channel made by two long piers to the lake--blue, restless,
immeasurable. To right and left stretched the long Michigan coast, with
its low yellow hills topped with the green of twisted pines, firs, and
beeches, with always its beach of sand, deep and dry to the very edge of
its tideless sea, strewn with sawlogs, bark, and the ancient remains of
ships.

After he had cooled he arose and made his way back to a pleasant
hardwood forest of maple and beech. Here the leaves were just bursting
from their buds. Underfoot the early spring flowers--the hepaticas,
the anemones, the trilium, the dog-tooth violets, the quaint, early,
bright-green undergrowths--were just reaching their perfection.
Migration was in full tide. Birds, little and big, flashed into view and
out again, busy in the mystery of their northward pilgrimage, giving
the appearance of secret and silent furtiveness, yet each uttering his
characteristic call from time to time, as though for a signal to others
of the host. The woods were swarming as city streets, yet to Orde these
little creatures were as though invisible. He stood in the middle of a
great multitude, he felt himself under the observation of many bright
eyes, he heard the murmuring and twittering that proclaimed a throng,
he sensed an onward movement that flowed slowly but steadily toward the
pole; nevertheless, a flash of wings, a fluttering little body, the dip
of a hasty short flight, represented the visible tokens. Across the pale
silver sun of April their shadows flickered, and with them flickered the
tracery of new leaves and the delicacy of the lace-like upper branches.

Orde walked slowly farther and farther into the forest, lost in an
enjoyment which he could not have defined accurately, but which was so
integral a portion of his nature that it had drawn him from the banks
and wholesale groceries to the woods. After a while he sat down on a
log and lit his pipe. Ahead the ground sloped upward. Dimly through the
half-fronds of the early season he could make out the yellow of sands
and the deep complementary blue of the sky above them. He knew the Lake
to lie just beyond. With the thought he arose. A few moments later he
stood on top the hill, gazing out over the blue waters.

Very blue they were, with a contrasting snowy white fringe of waves
breaking gently as far up the coast as the eye could reach. The beach,
on these tideless waters, was hard and smooth only in the narrow strip
over whic