as
blue and sweet as the eyes of loved rocked its baby clouds in cradles of
fresh winds.

They blew over vast reaches of forest and plain, these winds, wimpling
the new grass with playful fingers, and whispering in the ear of bird
and bee and flower that spring was come once more.

They came from the west, sweeping over sweet high meadows, over rushing
streams, and down from fair plateaus, and their breath was fresh and
cool with promise to one who faced them, eager in his hope, for they
brought the virgin sweetness of the Land of the Whispering Hills. By
streams, clear as crystal, he passed with a swinging stride, this lean
young man in the buckskins of the forest traveller, over meadows soft in
their green carpets, through woodlands whose flecked sunshine quivered
and shook on the young moss beneath, and ever his face was lifted to the
west with undying hope, with calmness of faith, and that great joy which
is humble in its splendour.

Thus he swung forward all through the pleasant hours of that last
day. Before him, raised against the sky, there loomed the magic Hills
themselves, fair to the eye of man, clothed in the green of blowing
grass and girdled about below with the encroaching forest.

At dusk he set foot upon their swelling slopes, and knew himself to be
near the goal of his heart's desire.

Over among them somewhere lay the blue lake. He could already hear the
murmur of its whispering shores, the roar of its circling forests, for
the trees followed on and over through some low defile as if loath to
lose the hills themselves, rising to heaven in virgin smoothness of
cloud-shadowed verdure.

The sun had gone behind them in splendid panoply of fire when he came
down into the sheltered woods, and through them to a wondrous meadow,
beautiful as the fields of Paradise, sloping, to the shore beyond where
waters blue as the sky above sent back the pageantry of light.

Here were the signs of tillage and cultivation, and even now a long dark
strip attested the spring's new work, sending forth on the evening air
the sweet scent of fresh-turned earth.

Beyond, across the field, in the edge of the farther woods, thin blue
smoke curled peacefully up from the pointed tops of some forty native
lodges, while nearer the lake there stood two cabins, one old and solid
with a look of having faced the elements for years, the other staring in
its newness. Indian ponies grazed at the clearing's edge or drank of
the rippl