YOUTH



  1.  Burzee

  Have you heard of the great Forest of Burzee?  Nurse used to
sing of it when I was a child.  She sang of the big
tree-trunks, standing close together, with their roots
intertwining below the earth and their branches intertwining
above it; of their rough coating of bark and queer, gnarled
limbs; of the bushy foliage that roofed the entire forest,
save where the sunbeams found a path through which to touch
the ground in little spots and to cast weird and curious
shadows over the mosses, the lichens and the drifts of dried
leaves.

  The Forest of Burzee is mighty and grand and awesome to those
who steal beneath its shade.  Coming from the sunlit meadows
into its mazes it seems at first gloomy, then pleasant, and
afterward filled with never-ending delights.

  For hundreds of years it has flourished in all its
magnificence, the silence of its inclosure unbroken save by
the chirp of busy chipmunks, the growl of wild beasts and the
songs of birds.

  Yet Burzee has its inhabitants--for all this.  Nature peopled
it in the beginning with Fairies, Knooks, Ryls and Nymphs.  As
long as the Forest stands it will be a home, a refuge and a
playground to these sweet immortals, who revel undisturbed in
its depths.

  Civilization has never yet reached Burzee.  Will it ever, I
wonder?