es the cushioning moss is green and through the brown tangled
weeds along Silver Creek the new grass is peeping. The sunny clearing
back of Petersen's woods will be full of mushrooms as the days deepen.
And already there are big golden dandelions in Widow Green's orchard.

In these still, warm noons you can hear through the waiting, echoing air
the laughing shouts of playing children and the low-dropping honk of the
wild geese that in a scarcely quivering line are sailing northward across
the reedy lowlands which the gentle spring rains will turn into soft,
violet, misty marshes.

The last bit of frost has thawed out of the old Glen Road and in the
young sunshine it seems to laugh goldenly as it climbs up, up to Jim
Gray's squatty, weathered little farmhouse. The eastern windows of this
little silver-gray house are gay with blossoming house plants and across
the back dooryard, flapping gently in the spring breeze, is a line of
gayly colored bed quilts. For Martha Gray has begun her house-cleaning.

The woodsy part of Grove Street, the part that was opened up only five
years ago and is called Lovers' Lane because it curves and winds
mysteriously through a lovely bit of woodland, is already shimmering with
the life and beauty of spring.

Down on Fern Avenue, which is a wide, grassy road and no avenue at all,
Uncle Roger Allan is carefully painting his chicken coops. Roger Allan
is a tall, twinkling, smooth-shaven old man, and he lives in a house as
twinkling and as tidy as himself. He is a bachelor, but years ago he
took little David from the dead arms of an unhappy, wild young stepsister
and has brought him up as his own. People used to know the reasons why
Roger Allan had never married but few remember now. Here he is at any
rate, painting his chicken coops and standing still every now and then to
stare off at Rabbit's Hill where his boy, tall, sturdy David Allan, is
plowing the warm, black fields.

Up in a narrow lane, at the side window of a blind-looking little house,
sits Mrs. Rosenwinkle. She is German and badly paralyzed and she
believes that the earth is flat and that if you walked far enough out
beyond Petersen's pasture you would most certainly fall off. She also
believes that only Lutherans like herself can go to heaven. But to-day,
beside the open window, with a soft, wooing, eiderdown little breeze
caressing her face, she is happy and unworried, her eyes busy with the
tender world and the two c