May 23, 1884.
Mr. Editor: -- The long and bitter winter is past.
"H'it mos' killed me.
But it has gone down the back entry of time."
Summer has come. It always does. I have been here sixty-two years, and there has been a summer every year. Sometimes I thought it wouldn't, but it always did come. I have grown to have faith in it. My last and most beautiful canoe rests in the cool, dry cellar right under where I am writing. I spend about an hour daily sparking her. I lift her by her handsome stems, and whisper of the long summer outing we are to have on the prattling, rattling waters of the Tiadatton, and she quivers and squirms like a trout; or, is it my imagination?Yes, summer has come, and the wood-thrush, the cat-bird, the oriole, the song-sparrow, the waltz-bird (the naturalists miss him), they are here. I said I would leave when the maples did. They are leaved, and I am left; but not for long. I shall go next week. Good-by, debts, duns, taxes, and deviltries. "Life is short, art is long." Just so. Nature is longer than either, or both, and a great sight better.
I rather think Outing has come to stay. I think it ought. I read indefatigably during the off-season, but never in the woods. And so, away for the woods!
Yours for Outing,
Nessmuk.
P.S. The same meaning wood-duck in the obsolete Narragansett tongue; more correctly wood-drake. See?
(From Outing, August 1884. To view it as it appeared in the magazine, click here or here.)
