eaths, while their soft little gray-furred heads are still tucked down
snugly, like a bird's head under its wing. Before even the snowdrops at
our feet and the maples overhead have thought of blossoming, a soft
breath may blow across our path filled with this wondrous fragrance. It
is like a dream of May. One might believe the fairies were passing by.

For years I was completely baffled by it. But one March, in the farm
orchard, I found out part of the secret. I was planting my sweet peas,
when the well-remembered and bewildering fragrance blew across me. I
sprang up and ran up the wind, and there, in the midst of the old
orchard, I came upon an old apple tree just cut down by the thrift of
Jonathan's farmer, who has no silly weakness for old apple trees. The
fresh-cut wood was moist with sap, and as I bent over it--ah, there it
was! Here were my hepaticas, my arbutus, here in the old apple tree!
Such a surprise! I sat down beside it to think it over. I was sorry it
was cut down, but glad it had told me its secret before it was made into
logs and piled in the woodshed. Blazing in the fireplace it would tell
me many things, but it might perhaps not have told me that.

And so I knew part of the secret. But only part. For the same fragrance
has blown to me often where there were no orchards and no newly felled
apple trees, and I have never, except this once, been able to trace it.
If it is the flowing sap in all trees, why are not the spring woods
full of it? But they are not full of it; it comes only now and then,
with tantalizing capriciousness. Do sound trees exhale it, certain
kinds, when the sap starts, or must they have been cut or bruised, if
not by the axe, perhaps by the winter winds and the ice storms? I do not
know. I only know that when that breath of sweetness comes, it is the
very breath of spring itself; it is the call of spring out of
winter--spring grass.

When the call of the spring grass comes, there is always one spot that
draws me with a special insistence, and every year we have much the same
talk about it.

"Jonathan," I say, "let's go to the Yellow Valley."

"Why," says Jonathan, "there will be more new birds up on the ridge."

"I don't care about new birds. The old ones do very well for me."

"And you might find the first hepaticas under Indian Rock."

"I know. We'll go there next."

"And if we went farther up the river, we might see some black duck."

"Very likely; but I don't feel as if