April Twentieth
Some one is forever telling us that one swallow does not make a summer. But what good is the first swallow, skimming on his side through the April afternoon, if it cannot raise a vaunted hope or encourage us to defy the gloomy and the unco circumspect! If they are right, those folk who are forever deriding the first man to try a thing, forever predicting disaster and living cautiously for a perfectly hypothetical old age, then let me, pray, be wrong. May I still, when I can count my hairs, be given grace and fortitude in the chill spring weather to say when first I see the wild spiral of the swallow that winter is over and done.
