tion had turned out to welcome the
arrival of spring. The street leading from the car terminal was thronged
with a constantly moving procession bound for the park. White-faced
stenographers and anaemic clerks came from the dingy boarding-house
districts to the north. Stockily built mechanics swaggered along with
their simpering, gaudily dressed lady loves. Here and there were entire
families of substantial Germans and Swedes, and occasionally, swarthy
Italians and beady-eyed, voluble Jews. Sooner or later, they all lost
themselves in the winding gravel paths of the park, or made their way to
the broad walk along the lake front, where the air was filled with their
polyglot babel.

"Isn't it peachy?" asked John as the boys passed the long, parallel rows
of poplars which marked the edge of the park. "Come on, Bill. Let's go
to the island."

The path led them by the boat landing. All traces of the warming house
which had sheltered so many numbed skaters during the winter had been
removed. In its stead, were piled rows upon rows of yellow,
flat-bottomed boats, one on top of another, with boards separating them.

"Look!" John pointed them out. "That means summer's coming soon, and
fishing, and school vacation." On the island, they found two severely
dressed, angular students from the university who stood beneath a small
brown bird in the branch of a budding maple. As he sunned himself
happily, the taller of the two consulted a book which she held in one
hand in a manner vaguely suggestive of Miss Brown and school
recitations.

"It is a little smaller than Wilson's thrush, Maria," she admitted.
"Still----"

John chuckled; "Nothing but a sparrow." He brushed past a bench on which
was squatted a be-shawled, unwashed, immigrant grandmother. "Come on
down this little path, Bill. Perhaps we can find some birds if we look."

But the season was still a little too early for the arrival of the
robins, the yellowhammers, and the elusive kinglets and thrushes from
the southland. Though the boys stalked in and out the winding,
bush-beset trail, their search startled only nervous-tailed squirrels
and dozens of the feathered gamins which had so sorely puzzled the two
schoolmams. But the dandelions were poking their green shoots through
the deposit of snow-packed autumn leaves, and the moss on the tree
trunks lightened the somber gray of the bark. In one inlet of the
lagoon, John caught a gleam in the water which was not a ripple
ref