this morning, you useless black mite?"

Two indignant green spots flamed up in the blackness and the mite
itself turned into a fierce little bow, bent to shoot, and in a flash,
bow quiver and all shot like lightning up the tree, spitting arrows in
all directions.

Christina forgot all about her ambitions and laughed aloud, and Sport
joined her, leaping around her and laughing silently in his own dog
fashion with tongue and tail. It was very hard to remember that one
was nineteen and had never been anywhere nor attained anything,
impossible to remember when the orchard was aflame in the sunrise, and
the oriole was shouting from the elm tree. Christina burst into song,
just as spontaneously as the robins.

It was a very foolish song, too, one that Jimmie had brought home from
Algonquin High School:

"Oh, Judy O'Toole,
It's you that's the fool,
For lavin' the county o' Cork.
Oh, Judy O'Toole,
It's you that's the fool,
That iver ye came to New York!"

Ellen, her eldest sister, was frying the pork and potatoes for
breakfast in the old summer kitchen. She looked through the door as
the singer passed.

"Christine!" she called reprovingly. "Whatever will that girl sing
next?"

Uncle Neil, who was drying his hands on the roller towel at the door,
laughed indulgently.

"It isn't jist the kind of a hymn that would do for prayer-meeting," he
said. "Hi, Christine! Is that a new psalm tune you're practisin'?"

But, Christina and her song had disappeared into the spring house.
This was a little stone structure, built into the grassy hill behind
the house. Down beside it, overhung with willows, a little spring
gushed out of the sand, clear and cold on the hottest summer days. And
so, in the little stone building, Christina's butter was always sweet
and hard, like golden bricks.

She set about her work with swift motions. It was necessary to work
harder than usual to-day, to get rid of the ache to be away doing
something else. She set the separator whirling, giving out its droning
song of plenty--the farm Matins and Vespers.

"Jimmie," she called up the little stone stairway, "hurry down here,
Lazybones, and turn the Gramophone."

A big clumsy boy, whose body was getting ahead of his mind in the race
for maturity, came thumping down the steps with the calves' empty
pails. He pulled a loose strand of his sister's hair as he seized the
handle of the separator.

"Now, Mrs. Johnnie Dunn," he war