he brutality of winter as in that evening snowstorm at
Quebec, I was never so conscious, as at the time of our visit to the
Burge plantation, of the superlative soft sweetness of the spring.

In seasons, as in other things, we have our individual preferences.
Melancholy natures usually love autumn, with its colorings so like sweet
sad minor chords. But what kind of natures they are which rejoice in
spring, which feel that with each spring the gloomy past is blotted out,
and life, with all its opportunities, begins anew--what kind of natures
they are which recognize April instead of January as the beginning of
their year I shall not attempt to tell, for mine is such a nature, and
one must not act at once as subject and diagnostician.

So long as I endure, spring can never come again without turning my
thoughts to northwestern Georgia; to the peculiar penetrating warmth
which passed through the clothing to the body and made one feel that one
was not surrounded by mere air, but was immersed in a dry bath of some
infinitely superior vapor, a vapor volatile, soothing, tonic, distilled,
it seemed, from the earth, from pine trees, tulip trees, balm-of-Gilead
trees, (or "bam" trees, as they call them), blossoming Judas trees,
Georgia crabapple, dogwood pink and white, peach blossom, wistaria,
sweet-shrub, dog violets, pansy violets, Cherokee roses, wild
honeysuckle and azalia, and the evanescent green of new treetops, all
carried in solution in the sunlight. By day the brilliant cardinal adds
his fine note of color and sound, but at night he is silent, and when
the moon comes out one hears the mockingbird and, it may be also, two
whippoorwills, one in the grove near the house, one in the woods across
the road, calling back and forth. Then one is tempted to step down from
the porch, and follow the voices of the birds into the vague recesses of
a night webbed with dark tree shadows outlined in blue moonlight.

Small wonder it is, if, as report says, no houseparty on a southern
plantation is a success unless young couples become "sort of engaged,"
and if in a region so provocative in springtime under a full moon, a
distinction is recognized between being merely "engaged," and being
engaged _to be married_.

One Georgia belle we met, a sloe-eyed girl whose reputation not only for
beauty but for charm reached through the entire South, had, at the time
of our visit, recently become engaged in the more grave and permanent
sense.