ive with us."

"At night we light the fire and watch it crackling, and I sit on
mother's knee. Ain't I a big boy to sit on a lady's knee?--and she
tells me. At Purple Springs there's pansies as big as plates--mother
will draw them for you--and the rocks are always warm, and the streams
are boiling hot, and nobody is ever sick there or tired. Daddy
wouldn't have died if we'd stayed there. But there's things in life no
one understands. We'll never leave when we go back."

The boy rambled on, his eyes shining with a great excitement. Pearl
thought she was listening to the fanciful tales with which a lonely
woman beguiled the weary hours for her little son It was a weirdly
extravagant fairy story, and yet it fascinated Pearl in spite of it's
unlikeness to truth. It had all the phantasy of a midsummer night's
dream.

The boy seemed to answer her thoughts.

"Ain't it great to have something lovely to dream over, teacher? I bet
you've got sweet dreams, too. Mother says that what kills people's
souls is when they have no purple springs in their lives. She says
she's sorry for lots of people They live and walk around, but their
souls are dead, because their springs have dried up."

Pearl drew him closer to her. He was so young--and yet so old--so
happy, and yet so lonely. She wanted to give him back a careless,
happy, irresponsible childhood, full of frolicking fun and mischief,
without care or serious thought. She longed to see him grubby-fisted
bare-footed, tousle-haired, shouting and wrestling with her young
tykes of brothers. It was not natural or happy to see a child so
elfin, so remote, so conscious of the world's sorrows.

"Will you come with me now, teacher?" he asked eagerly.

Pearl could not resist the appeal. The sun hung low in an amber haze
as they left the school and took the unfrequented road to the brown
house on the hill--the house of mystery.

The air was full of the drowsy sounds of evening; cattle returning
after their day's freedom in the fields, cow-bells tinkling
contentedly. Somewhere in the distance a dog barked; and on the gentle
breeze came the song of a hermit thrush, with an undertone of cooing
pigeons. The acrid smell of burning leaves was in the air.

The river valley ran into the sunset with its bold scrub-covered
banks, on the high shoulder of which the railway cut made a deep welt,
purple now with evening. Every day the westbound train, with its gray
smoke spume laid back on its neck