d him into fresh
endeavours. All his powerful, unspent youth spurred on to manhood.

IV

At last the rains were over. The sun came out again, and with it the
growth of the season burst into abundance. There were bird-notes on the
air, fragrance in the stillness, bloom on the trees. In the thicket
dogwood massed itself in clouds of dead-white stars, like an errant
trail from the Milky Way, lighting the wooded twilight. Wild azalea, so
deeply rose that the hue seemed of the blood, wafted its sharp,
unearthly scent across the underbrush to the road. The woods were vocal
with the mating songs of their winged inhabitants. The music of the
thrush welled from the sheer forceful joy of living. "It is
good--good--good to be a lover!" he sang again and again with amorous
repetition and a full-throated flourish of improvisation. In the pauses
of the thrush sounded the cheery whistle of the redbird, the crying of
the catbird, the liquid tones of the song sparrow, and the giddy
exclamations of the pewee. Sometimes an oriole darted overhead in a
royal flash of black and yellow, a robin stood in the road and delivered
a hearty invitation, or a hawk flew past, pursued by martins.

With the spring planting came a chance of outdoor work, and Nicholas
would sometimes rise at dawn and do a piece of ploughing before
breakfast. He had driven the team out one morning across the brown, bare
earth, which the plough had ripped open in a jagged track, when
something in the silence and the scents of nature smote him suddenly as
with a vital force. Dropping the reins to the ground, he threw back his
head and breathed a keen, quick sense of exaltation. A warm mist, sweet
and fresh as the breath of a cow, overhung hill and field, road and
meadow. In a black-browed cedar tree a mocking-bird was singing.

With a sudden shout Nicholas voiced the glorification of toil--of honest
work well done. He felt with the force of a revelation that to throw up
the clods of earth manfully is as beneficent as to revolutionise the
world. It was not the matter of the work, but the mind that went into
it, that counted--and the man who was not content to do small things
well would leave great things undone. The beasts before him did not
shirk their labour because it was clay and not gold dust that trailed
behind the plough; why should he? And where was happiness if it sprung
not from the soil? Where contentment if it dwelt not near to Nature? For
what was bet