that come the last of March, and
with it the early-arriving bluebirds. They were there when Winn reached
the now deserted farmhouse, where a snow-drift still lingered against
its northern side and patches of the same winter pall draped each stone
wall. The brook which crossed the meadow in front was a brimming
torrent; the barn shed across the road was filled with a confusion of
worn-out vehicles, broken and rusted farming tools half buried in snow,
a drift of which remained in the empty barn, the door of which had
fallen to earth: the fences had great gaps in them; gates were missing;
and ruin and desolation were visible on all sides.

The house that had once been "Home, Sweet Home," to Winn was the most
lugubrious blotch of all. It had grown brown and moss-covered with time
and the elements, missing window-panes were replaced with rags, bushes
choked the dooryard, and, as he peered into what had once been the "best
room," snow lay on the floor and strips of paper hung from the walls.

How small the house seemed to what it once had! The old well-sweep had
been used to patch the garden fence, the woodshed roof had fallen in,
and a silence that seemed to crawl out of that old ruin brooded over it.

This was his boyhood home, and on it lay the burden of three years'
taxes and a mortgage!

And as Winn looked into windows and then entered, crossing floors
gingerly, lest they give way and pitch him into the cellar, he felt that
it would be a mercy to the world to set the old rookery on fire and
remove it from human sight.

The solitary note of joy about it was a bluebird piping away in the
near-by orchard, and for that bird's presence there, Winn felt grateful.

Then he wandered over the orchard, searching for the tree that had
borne seek-no-further apples, and another where he had once met a colony
of angry hang-legs while climbing to rob a bird's nest. He failed to
reach the nest, but those vicious wasps reached him easily enough, and
as Winn recalled the incident he smiled--the first time that day.

For two hours he roamed about the farm, now hunting for the tree where
he had shot his first squirrel, and then the thicket in which he had
once kept a box-trap set for rabbits. He followed the brook up to the
gorge, sauntered through the chestnut grove and back to where a group of
sugar maples and a sap house stood, thankful that the familiar rocks yet
remained and that the trees had not been cut away, and for the
blu