tage. In this region the liverwort blooms
fragrantly beside the snow-bank in early spring, and here the arbutus
exists as in New England. The adder-tongues and violets and anemones
are here in rare profusion in their time, and the wandering gray wolf,
last of his kind, almost, treads softly over knolls carpeted with
wintergreen and decorated with scarlet berries. It is a country of
blue water and pure air, of forest depths and long alleys arching above
strong streams.

This is the southern peninsula of Michigan in its northern part, and
here came, as the first suspicion of a tinge of yellow came to the
leaves of certain trees, as the hard maple trees first flashed out in
faint red, two people.

There were three of them who came at first, for there was the man with
the wagon, engaged in the outlying settlement, who brought them fifteen
miles into the depths of the woodland. They came lumbering through an
archway over an old trail, the homesteader sitting jauntily, howbeit
uncertainly, upon the front seat--for the roadway tilted in spots--and
behind him a couple from the town, a man and a woman, the man laughing
and supporting his companion as the wagon swayed, and the woman
wondering and plucky, and laughing, too, at the oddness of it all. The
forest amazed her a little, and awed her a little, but from awe of it
soon came, as they plunged along, much friendliness. She was
receptive, this game woman, and knew Nature when she met her.

In the rear of the wagon crouched or stood upright, or laid down, as
the mood came upon his chestnut-colored grandness, a great Irish
setter, loved of the man because of many a day together in stubble or
over fallow, loved of the woman because he, the setter, had already
learned to love and regard the woman as an arbitrator, as queen of
something he knew not what.

And so the wagon rumbled on and pitched and tilted, and finally, in
mid-afternoon, reached a place where the road seemed to end. There was
a little open glade, but a few yards across, and there was dense forest
all around, and, just beyond the glade, the tree-tops seemed to all be
lowered, because there was a descent and a lake half a mile long, as
clear as crystal and as blue as the sky. A little way beyond the glade
could be heard the gurgling and ruffling of a creek, which, through a
deep hollow, came athwart the forest and plunged into the lake most
willingly. This was the place where these two people, this man an