pected little
clearings where always the same gray cabin of rough, weathered boards
sat under its geyser jets of pink and white, while shy, pretty
children peeped like startled rabbits from the dim doorway and the pig
ran off through the woods (when he did not follow me), and finally up
the steep slope at the head of a cove again, into the region of the
earliest bloodroots, and so to the final shin up the last precipitous
wall to the plateau above. As I reached the summit and looked back, I
saw the cove was green, and the veil I had gazed through that morning
was hazier now; Spring had climbed with me back up the slope and even
here on the two-thousand foot rim the trees were bursting into leaf.
There was a carpet of brilliant red stonecrop on the rock at my feet.
As I came once more to the brook in Thumping Dick I saw a bloodroot on
the bank, with the dead leaf it had that day pushed up still clinging
to it. Yes--and here was a tiny bed of violets, in a warm, sheltered
glade, opening to the sun. I gathered them all, and redecorated my
hat. Then I bathed my hot face in the brook and lay listening to a
thrasher for a while, as the long shadows of afternoon crept like
lean, ghostly fingers through the forest and between me and the sky I
could see the lacework of the budding twigs, with here and there a
tree that actually showed leaf. No one passed me on the trail. The
thrasher and I had the woods all to ourselves, except, of course, for
Spring, who sat beside me singing _mezza voce_, to herself, a song
curiously like the ripple of a brook.

At last I rose and followed the dim trail back toward the college,
entering the campus as the evening lights were coming on in the
dormitory windows, and somewhere a group of boys were singing, not
lustily but with the plaintive quality that sometimes steals into the
voices of the young and happy at the twilight hour. I tossed my hat on
a table, and saw my withered violets falling dejectedly over the
band. But I did not care. Back below Thumping Dick was a cove full on
the march, coming up the slope, the blue battalions of the Spring.
Outside, in the smoky, warm dusk, a thrasher still sang. Spring had
left me, for she had far to go, but all the way north I should see the
signs where her feet had trod, and when at last I reached once more my
northern mountain home, I should find her waiting with a smile,
perhaps with just a trillium in her hand to offer me, before she sped
on again tow