It led down the headwall by sharp switchbacks till it reached the
easier declivity below, passed a gushing spring where a tin dipper
hung on a twig proclaiming unseen passers, and presently picked up the
bed of a tumbling brook. It was when I reached this brook that I was
aware of Spring coming up the slope. I could see ahead, and to either
side, a considerable distance through the open woods, and, lo! the
Judas trees were in flower, stray bursts of purplish pink lighting up
the forest floor like bright-robed, wandering dryads. (The mountain
folk call this shrub the red-bud.) I loitered on down the brook side,
through moist leaf-mould and rocks, while overhead the trees began to
cover me with their frail, new foliage, and under foot the forest
floor began to burgeon with bloom. Great double bloodroots came
first--I stepped suddenly into a garden of them and hastily stooping
crushed some juice on my fingers. Next the umbrella tops of the May
apple leaves began to push up. There was a great dogwood tree in full
bloom beside the path. A hedge-like bank of azaleas were showing bud.
Then came the violets, yellow violets, wood violets, but especially
the birdfoot variety, with their pink-tinged blue petals ubiquitous
amid the leaves. To me this violet is particularly dear, for it was
the flower which in my childhood was culled to fill those
bright-colored May baskets we hung upon our sweethearts' doors at the
festival of Spring, gathering them in the village cemetery, where they
grew in great beauty and profusion, quite as Omar would have expected.
Now I gathered a handful again, for memory's sake, and stuck them in
the band of my hat, before I resumed my journey down the cove.

The first intimation I had of coming habitation was a pig, a lean,
black, razor-back pig which grunted at my intrusion beneath his oak
tree and went racing off at a great pace, almost gracefully, I might
say, for even a pig which wanders on a mountainside develops something
of the agility of a wild creature. Not far beyond I came quite
suddenly upon such a picture as you may see nowhere in the world but
in our southern highlands, in the Spring. Aware of my coming, if I was
not aware of their proximity, six tow-headed, bare-footed,
single-garmented children, the eldest a girl not over ten, the
youngest an infant just able to stand, were ranged in solemn row, like
a flight of steps, upon the top of a large flat stone at the edge of a
little clearing