selves from Madeline's household, and to form a
separate and complete establishment of their own in the sunny kitchen,
away out at the end of the Ark. I was still, nominally, Madeline's
boarder, and sat at the table with her and the little Keelers; but the
impulses of my heart were ever guiding my feet to that other dear resort,
where doors and hearts seemed always open to receive me, and an
inexpressible warmth and light and comfort pervaded the atmosphere.

It was early in March, when, returning from school one day at the
noontide intermission, I found Grandma standing without the Ark,
singularly occupied. The sun was shining on her uncovered head, and the
tranquil glow on her face was clearly the exponent of no fictitious
happiness. In her apron she had a quantity of empty egg-shells, so
carefully drained of their contents as to present an almost perfect
external appearance, and these she was arranging on the twigs of a large
bush that grew just outside the window.

I was glad, afterwards, that I intruded then no skeptical questions as to
her purpose, for, as I stood and looked at her, her action gradually lost
for me the tinge of eccentricity, with which it had at first seemed
imbued. I realized that there was something grander than reason, more
exalted than philosophy.

"I suppose you've heerd about egg-plants, teacher;" said she, at length,
turning to me, while the sun in her face broke up into scintillant beams
that penetrated my being, and quickened my very soul. "This 'ere old
bush ain't bore nothin' for years, and it looked so bare and sorrerful,
somehow, standin' out here all alone, and everything else a kinder wakin'
up in the spring, I thought I'd try to sorter liven it up a little;" and
she resumed her placid occupation.

"Blessed Grandma," I could only murmur, as I turned to enter the Ark;
"inspired, delightful soul!"

It was in March that the Wallencamp sun-bonnets came forth, all in a
single day, a curious and startling pageant. The Modoc, who had gone
bareheaded through the winter, assumed hers as a turban of impressive
altitude, while the diminutive Carietta and the infant Sophronia appeared
but as vagrant telescopes on insufficient pegs.

In March the "pipers" lifted up their homesick notes at nightfall, in the
meadows. On the last day of that month, I found arbutus in bloom under
the leaves in the cedar woods.

Scarcely had the first faint signs of herbage appeared on the earth ere
the Walle