And why, across the aching field,
Does one lone cricket chirrup on;
Why one surviving butterfly,
With all its bright companions gone?

And why, when faces all about
Whiten and wither hour by hour,
Does one old face bloom on so sweet,
As young as when it was a flower_?

The same mystery was again presented to us a little farther along the
road, as we stopped at a lone schoolhouse among the hills, the only house
to be seen, and asked our way of the young schoolmarm. The door had been
left half open, and, knocking, we had stepped into the almost empty
schoolroom, with its portrait of Lincoln and a map of the United States.
Three scholars sat there with their kindly-faced teacher, studying
geography amid the silence of the hills, which the little room seemed to
concentrate in a murmuring hush, like a shell. A little boy sat by
himself a desk or two behind two young girls, and as we entered, and the
studious faces looked up in surprise, we saw only the pure brows and the
great spiritual eyes of the older girl, almost a woman, and we thought of
the lonely roses we had found up on the hillside. Here was another rose
blooming in the wilderness, a face lovely and beautiful as a spring
reflecting the sky in the middle of a wood. How had she come there, that
beautiful child-woman in the solitude? By what caprice of the strange law
of the distribution of fair faces had she come to flower in this
particular waste place of the earth?--for her face had surely come a long
way, been blown blossom-wise on some far wandering wind, from realms of
old beauty and romance, and it had the exiled look of all beautiful