The Project Gutenberg EBook of The First Day of Spring, by Mari Wolf

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Title: The First Day of Spring

Author: Mari Wolf

Illustrator: Ed Emsh

Release Date: June 9, 2010 [EBook #32760]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE FIRST DAY OF SPRING

By Mari Wolf

Illustrated by Ed Emsh

[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from IF Worlds of Science
Fiction June 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

[Sidenote: _Here is a love story of two young people who met under the
magic of festival time. One was Trina, whose world was a gentle
make-believe Earth. The other was Max, handsome spaceman, whose world
was the infinite universe of space...._]

The First Day of spring, the man at the weather tower had said, and
certainly it felt like spring, with the cool breeze blowing lightly
about her and a faint new clover smell borne in from the east.
Spring--that meant they would make the days longer now, and the nights
shorter, and they would warm the whole world until it was summer again.

[Illustration]

Trina laughed aloud at the thought of summer, with its picnics and
languid swims in the refilled lakes, with its music and the heavy scent
of flowers and the visitors in from space for the festival. She laughed,
and urged her horse faster, out of its ambling walk into a trot, a
canter, until the wind streamed about her, blowing back her hair,
bringing tears to her eyes as she rode homeward toward the eastern
horizon--the horizon that looked so far away but wasn't really.

"Trina!"

His voice was very close. And it was familiar, though for a moment she
couldn't imagine who it might be.

"Where are you?" She had reined the horse in abruptly and now looked
around her, in all directions, toward the north and south and east and
west, toward the farm houses of the neighboring village, toward the
light