ere came from the far end of the meadow two clear, glad notes of
nature's voice, that entered her soul like a call from the pastures of
Rosemont; a missing rhyme sent to make good the failing poetry of love's
declining day. She sprang to the top of the rise with her open hand to
her hat-brim, the dew still in her lashes, her lips parted fondly, and
her ear waiting to hear again the whistle of the quail. Many a day in
those sunny springtimes when she still ran wild with Johanna had she
held taunting parley with those two crystal love-notes, and now she
straightened to her best height, pursed her lips, whistled back the
brave octave, and listened again. A distant cowbell tinkled from some
willows in another meadow across the river, a breeze moved audibly by,
and then the answer came. "Bob--Bob White?" it inquired from the top of
a pine-covered bluff, round which the stream swept down in
boulder-strewn rapids to its smoother course between the two meadows. It
may be the name was not just that, but it was certainly two
monosyllables! The listener stepped quickly to the nearest bush,
answered again, and began to move warily from cover to cover in the
direction of the call. Once she delayed her response. A man and wife
with three or four children, loitering down the river bank, passed so
close to her as to be startled when at last they saw her, although she
was merely sitting at the roots of a great tree deeply absorbed in a
book. A few steps farther put a slight ridge and a clump of bushes
between the couple and the student; and the man, glancing back, had just
noticed it, when--

"Hear that quail!" he exclaimed, and stopped his wife with a touch.

"What of it?" asked the helpmate, who was stoop-shouldered.

"Why, we must have passed in a few feet of it! It's right there where we
saw that girl!"

The woman's voice took on an added dreariness as she replied: "We might
'a' seen it if you hadn't been so taken up with the girl. James, come
back! you know 'tain't that bird you're peekin' after. O land o' love!
men _air_ sich fools!"

The man found neither girl nor quail; the grassy seat beneath the tree
was empty. But just as he was rejoining his partner--"Hark!" he said;
"there he is again, farther up the river. Now if we listen like's not
we'll hear another fellow answer him. Many's the time I've lain in the
grass and called one of them right up. There! that was the answering
challenge, away off yonder between here and tha