talk about it."

"Course I got faith," she answered. "It ain't any use for anybody to
tell me there ain't a good time coming. I don't have to conjure up some
kind of a hope. I know."

"How do you know?" asked Jerry.

She gave a sudden irrepressible laugh.

"I guess it's because the sky is so pretty," she said. "Maybe the robins
have got something to do with it. Days like this I feel as if I was
right inside the pearly gates. I truly do."

They were entering the shade of evergreens that bordered the ravine
road, where there were striated cliffs, and little runnels came
trickling down to join the stream below.

"I guess there ain't a spot round here that means more to folks in our
neighborhood than this," said Marietta. "Remember the time somebody
wanted to name it 'Picnic Road'? There were seventeen picnics that
summer, if I recollect, all in our set."

"Yes," said Jerry. He remembered his poem about the "awesome
amphitheatre nature wrought," and wondered if Marietta also recalled it
and would quote some of it. But she only said:--

"That kind of a round where we used to eat our suppers is about the
prettiest spot I ever see. That's where I'm going to set up my tent
whilst you're making your call. When you come back you can poke right on
in there and 'coot,' and I'll answer."

Jerry's mercurial spirits were mounting now. The past few minutes had
given him two beautiful subjects for poetry. He could make some
four-lined verses, he thought, about the tree that was a bride in spring
and the next winter robed for burial. He could hear the cadence of them
now, beating through his head in premonitory measures. Then there was
the other fancy that life was a procession to an unknown goal. Jerry had
read very little, except in the works of Ruth Bellair and her compeers,
and the imaginings he wrought in had a way of seeming new and strange.
The talk went on, drifting back irresistibly by the familiar way they
were taking to the spring of their own lives, not, it seemed, in search
of a lost youth, but as if they had it with them, an invisible third, in
all their memories.

"Here we are," said Jerry. He drew up at the bars that led into old
Blaisdell's sugar-camp, and Marietta, not waiting for him, sprang out
over the wheel. "You're as light as a feather," said he admiringly, but
with no sense of wonder. They were still in that childhood land where
everybody is agile for one long, bright day.

"Light as a bun," return