eness climatic. Normally
it is the time of starting sap and swelling buds and steaming leaf beds
odorous of spring; the month when the migratory crows wing their flight
northward, and Nature, lightest of winter sleepers in the azurine
latitudes, stirs to her vernal awakening. None the less, in the
Tennessee March the orchardist, watching the high-blown clouds in skies
of the softest blue, is glad if the peach buds are slow in responding to
the touch of the wooing airs, or, chewing a black birch twig as he makes
the leisurely round of his line fence, warns his gardening neighbor that
it is too early to plant beans. True, the poplars may be showing a tinge
of green, and the buds of the hickory may have lighted their tiny candle
flames on the winter-bared boughs; but the "blackberry winter" is yet to
come, and there are rigorous possibilities still lingering in the
high-flying clouds and the sudden-shifting winds.

It was on the fourth Sunday in the month that Ardea rose early and went
fasting to the communion service at St. John's-in-Paradise. Primarily,
St. John's was merely the religious factor in Mr. Duxbury Farley's
scheme of country-colony promotion, and for the greater part of the year
its silver-toned bell was silent and its appeal was mainly to the
artistic eye. But latterly St. Michael's, the mother church in South
Tredegar, had attained a new assistant rector whose zeal was not yet
dulled by apathetic unresponsiveness on the part of the to-be-helped.
Hence St. Michael's various missions flourished for the time, and once a
month, if not oftener, the bell of St. John's sent its note abroad on
the still morning air of Paradise.

On this particular Sunday morning Ardea was early at the church, and she
was glad she had decided to wear her cloth gown. It had turned cooler in
the night and the azure March sky was hidden behind a gray cloud mass
which hung low on the slopes of the mountain. There was no fire in the
church heater; and the few worshipers--the Vancourt Henniker girls, the
two Misses Harrison, John Young-Dickson, of The Dell, dragged out at the
chilly hour by his new wife, and Mrs. Schuyler Farnsworth and her
daughter, all of the country-house colony beyond the creek--sat or
knelt, and shivered through the service in decorous discomfort.

Miss Dabney was not looking quite as well as usual, as Miss Betsy
Harrison remarked to her sister, Miss Willie, in a church whisper. She
had grown thinner during the win