s, and the shadows of the ancient
firs were short and luminous. Then suddenly the woods broke away before
him.

Far below he saw the blue sea sparkling. But it was not the beauty of
the sea that held his eyes. From his very feet the road dropped down
through open, half-cleared burnt lands, a stretch of rough
pasture-fields, and a belt of sloping meadow, to a little white village
clustering about an inlet. The clutter of roofs was homelike to his
eyes, hungry with long loneliness; the little white church, with shining
spire and cross, was very homelike. But nearer, in the very first
pasture-field, just across the burnt land, was a sight that came yet
nearer to his heart. There, in a corner of the crooked snake-fence,
stood two bay mares and a foal, their heads over the fence as they gazed
up the hill in his direction. Up went mane and tail, and loud and long
he neighed to them his greeting. Their answer was a whinny of welcome,
and down across the fields he dashed at a wild gallop that took no heed
of fences. When, a little later in the day, a swarthy French-Canadian
farmer came up from the village to lead his mares down to water, he was
bewildered with delight to find himself the apparent master of a
splendid white stallion, which insisted on claiming him, nosing him
joyously, and following at his heels like a dog.

When the Logs Come Down

It was April, and the time of freshet, when

"Again the last thin ice had gone
To join the swinging sea."

After the ice was all away the river had risen rapidly, flooding the
intervale meadows, till in some places the banks, deep under water, were
marked only by the tops of the alder and willow bushes, and by a line of
elms growing, apparently, in the middle of a lake. Behind these elms the
water was as still as a lake; but in front of them it rushed in heavy
swirls, swaying the alders and willows, and boiling with swish and
gurgle around the resolutely opposing trunks.

Above the swollen flood of water,--the hurried retreat of the last snow
from a thousand forest valleys converging around the river's far-off
source,--washed softly the benign and illimitable flood of the April
air. This air seemed to carry with reluctance a certain fluctuating
chill, caught from the icy water. But in the main its burden was the
breath of willows catkin and sprouting grass and the first shy bloom on
the open edges of the uplands. It was the characteristic smell of the
northern s