"That yer goin' ter git er lickin' and wear patched dudth."

The day was further spoiled for Dolly and yet there was a sort of delight in her misery. How reprehensible was her conduct! How ungrateful of her not to wait! Now Shan was a hero a paragon of gallantry. Wasn't her leaving him just awful? And yet how embarrassing to both it would have been had she waited. She thought of that and smiled at her luck.

So the fates are kinder to us sometimes, after all, than we think.

The girls walked in the woods, as Mildred came part way home with her guest. They stooped to notice the starting of the familiar flowers which they had sought all their livescalling them by their own childish names. Later when they had bloomed they would seek them for their color merely - perchance a little for their form; but the blossom's aim in life and the mystery of the foliage shapes were not even mysteries to them; for such things had not yet provoked a thought.

Over their heads the boughs were still barethe buds clear cut against the gray perspective

— just hinting of the coming leafiness. If they glanced up and saw a last year's bird-nest, which the foliage had hidden before, or found one, leaf-filled, in the blackberry patch, which had escaped them in their berrying, this oversight was perhaps the only element of their ignorance that they realized.

The great realm of appreciation, which might make the woods a painting or a pastoral, had not come to them. They walked in hope, of course, of the conspicuous splendor which the opening leaf and bursting petal would surely thrust upon them, but they saw nothing of the immediate beauty aside from its mere promises, and could read nothing of the rugged, insistent poetry in the bare prophecy itself. Yet they were happy in the midst of the deep content of unaroused perceptions in the bliss of the purely animal anticipation that bounds high in those strong youthful hearts which feel that life owes them so much and pays all debts at par.

"Good-by. Don't tell nobody," said Dolly. "Not even somebody?" said Mildred, with a sly smile.

"Of course not. If you do, I'll—” and she ran back to her friend, and setting her teeth in

mock frenzy, beat her with the soft edge of her closed fist, and swung to her. Then the two clasped each other's waists and walked further on, and kissed and said good-by again, and laughed and blushed and parted.

When Dolly passed the place where the woodcock had her nest, she turned aside to see again the drab beauty of the eggs, but they were not there, she thought. She was sure this was the place. There was the hole that she had taken the bluebells from the conical cut of the knife. Where was the hole the nest was She stepped a little nearer, when, Swish! and the bird was again a hopeless invalid at her feet, and the four spotted eggs were again cooling in the late evening air.

"I reckon I didn't know how ter look," she mused. "Must be a little blind, anyway, or I'd see more'n I do other places besides about bird-nests."

Next morning, at a rather late breakfast, Henry, who had even stayed all night at the "Jenkins-es," but had come home early to eat, remarked:

"Seen Shan givin' his sorrel filly fits to er breakin' plough as I come by this mornin'.'

(Dolly brightened.

He was able to be out.)

"Had her in 'twixt ther two mules." (Dolly re

"Was er usin'

Wonder why?

joiced. He was punishing her.) er ridin' plough his father's. Used ter say he despised 'em, and could outwalk any team er ploughin'." (Dolly's eyes dropped into her plate. He was still lame and couldn't walk.) "He seems ter like er heap er things er late that he used ter didn't," he added, with a sly glance at his blushing sister. "How'd jer

"None of your business, Smarty." And her morning meal was finished.

CHAPTER IX

"It [the thrasher's song] was the cheapest kind of top dressing in which I had faith."-THOREAU.

"The farmer diagnoses the weather daily as a doctor a patient; he feels the pulse of the wind, he knows when the clouds have a scurfy tongue, when the cuticle of the day is feverish and dry or soft and moist."- BURROUGHS.

It was still cloudy and cool after a week of showers, as Shan sat upon the riding plough and watched the black prairie soil roll off the mouldboard. Two brown thrashers, early come, were vying with each other from different portions of the hedge, which by its friendly protective cover had led them thus out on the prairie from the woods. Here and there the old, lastyear's nests of these birds formed a sort of blurred bunch in the lower branches. Upon the topmost twig-tips they sat and sang charmingly to their expected mates, which had not arrived yet, of the last year's trysting-place and the pleasant anticipations of the new-year's home. Here, too, sat the logger-head shrike