美文欣赏 Hour in the Sun

　　Hour in the Sun

　　--John H.Bradley

　　“…I was rich, if not in money, in sunny hours and summer days.”----- Henry David Thoreau.

　　When Thoreau wrote that line, he was thinking of the Walden. Pond he knew as a boy.

　　Woodchoppers and the Iron Horse had not yet greatly damaged the beauty of its setting. A boy could go to the pond and lie on his back against the seat of a boat, lazily drifting from shore to shore while the loons dived and the swallows dipped around him. Thoreau loved to recall such sunny hours and summer days “when idleness was the most attractive and productive business.”

　　I too was a boy in love with a pond, rich in sunny hours and summer days. Sun and summer are still what they always were, but the boy and the pond changed. The boy, who is now a man, no longer find much time for idle drifting. The pond has been annexed by a great city. The swamps where herons once hunted are now drained and filled with houses. The bay where water lilies quietly floated is now a harbor for motor boats. In short, everything that the boy loved no longer exists----except in the man’s memory of it.

_小精灵 儿童网