[Quote] Sometimes when I am alone in the old bottom pasture, or the woods, the memory of blind Great-Aunt Mattie returns to me. I can see her again, sitting by the edge of the clear flowing stream where the children left her, surrounded by cattle and the wild birds, her head a little tilted, listening. She has been dead for close to forty years and only lately have I begun to understand what it was she heard. It was the song of the earth and streams and forests….

Louis Bromfield. Pleasant Valley (New York and London: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1943), Ch. 3, pp. 26-35, pp. 27-28, and 34-35 inclusive.