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The Two Magicians and the April Rains: April

Every year we see the April rains work wonders, bringing back last year's verdure to the dreary fields, restoring the foliage to the trees and the flowers to the meadows. Surely we would recognize such things for the miracles they really are if we weren't so used to them -- these veritable resurrections from the dead!

But can you imagine that these same April rains, and other rains, by a kind of black magic, have been made to transform a beautiful region of woods and fertile valleys into a stony desert? A desert where, as one of the inhabitants afterward said, it had been over forty years since he had heard the song of a bird and where many a poor peasant was compelled to go a five hours' journey, over rocks and precipices, to get a little load of fagots to be carried home on his shoulders.

Only when the management of affairs is left in the hands of the Green Magician of the tree-tops will the rains work their myriad miracles in the spring and summer world of reawakened life.

I. THE BLACK MAGICIAN AND THE WOODMAN Mix April rain-water or any other kind of rain-water, or the water of the melting snows, with Black Magic, and the results are so different and so dreadful that the true story of it is hard to believe. It sounds as fantastic as Mr. Shakespeare's account of the carryings-on of the witches on the blasted heath.