I initial t was the first day of vacation.

Schools, if you were not through with them, had now become empty, closed, silent buildings, stripped of authority to imprison and bedevil you and then mark you discreditably because you righteously rebelled against being imprisoned and bedeviled. They could safely be left to dust and cobwebs within and to any weeds that might lodge and sprout outside—the more the better. You stood on the spring edge of the long, free, careless summer and could look unconcernedly across at the distant autumn edge. Then as the woods, now in their first full green, were beginning to turn dry and yellow, the powerless buildings would again become tyrannical schools.

But if you had finished high school, on this first day of vacation you were on the Boy's Common: schools behind you, the world of business around you, ahead of you ambitious college or the stately University. Webster had been turned loose on the Boy's Common.

The family were at breakfast. Every breakfast in the cottage was much the same breakfast: routine is the peace of the roadless. Existence there throughout the year was three hundred and sixty-five times more or less like itself. The earth meantime did change for the signs of the zodiac: the cottage changed also, but had a zodiac of its own. Thus, when the planet was in the sign of Capricornus, the cottage on a morning had fried perch for breakfast, as a sign that it was in Pisces; when earth was in Gemini, the family might have a steak which showed that it was in Taurus—or that Taurus was in the family.

There was always hot meat of one kind and hot bread of two kinds and hot coffee of any kind. If Webster's father upon entering the breakfast room had not seen a dish before him to carve or apportion, the shock could not have been greater, had he found lying on his folded napkin an enclosure from the bank notifying him that he had been discharged for having made the figure four instead of the figure two.

He sat squarely facing the table as long as his own portion of the meat lasted, meantime eating rapidly and bending over to glance at his paper which lay flat beside his coffee cup. With the final morsel of meat he turned sidewise and sat cross-legged, with his paper held before his face as a screen—notification that he would rather not talk at the moment, unless they preferred.... If they showed that they did prefer, he still had means to discourage their preference. Now and then he reached around toward his plate and groped for the remaining crumbs of bread, or hooked his forefinger in the handle of his cup and conveyed it behind the paper.

Webster's mother, busied with service at the tray, commenced her breakfast after the others. She talked to her husband until he interposed his newspaper. Then she unconsciously lowered her voice and addressed remarks to the children. Occasionally she tried to arrange their dissensions.

A satirist of human life, studying Webster's father and mother at the head and foot of the table—symbol at once of their opposition and conjunction—a satirist, who for his own amusement turns life into pictures of something else, might have described their bodily and pictorial relation as that of a large, soft deep-dished pudding to a well trimmed mutton chop. Their minds he would possibly have imagined as two south winds moving along, side by side; whatever else they blew against, they could not possibly blow against each other.

On this fine June morning, the first day of his vacation, Webster was late for breakfast. He arranged to be late. From his bathroom-bedroom he could hear the family with their usual morning talk, Elinor's shrill chatter predominating. When her chatter ceased he would know that she had satisfied her whimsical appetite and had slipped from her chair, impatient either to get to the front porch with its creaky rocking-chair or to dart out the gate to other little girls in the block; restlessly seeking some adventure elsewhere if none should pass before her eyes at home.

He waited till she should go; there was something especial to speak of with his father and he did not wish this to be spoiled by Elinor's interference and ridicule.

When she was gone he went in to breakfast.

"Well, my son, how are you going to spend your first day of vacation?" his father inquired, helping him to his portion and not particularly noticing his own question.

"I thought I'd go over into the woods," Webster replied.

An unfavourable silence followed this announcement. That old stubborn controversy about the woods!...

"Father," asked Webster, with his eyes on his plate, "did you ever see the Kentucky warbler?"

Webster's father looked over the top of the wood-pulp screen. His face had a somewhat vacant expression. He waited. Finally he said:

"My son, I believe you asked me a question: I shall have to ask you to repeat your question; I may be losing my hearing or I may be losing my mind. You asked me—?"

Webster, in the same deliberate tone, repeated his question:

"Did you ever see the Kentucky warbler?"

Webster's father looked over his spectacles at Webster's mother as with the air of an appeal for guidance:

"My dear, your son asks me, if I understand him, whether I have ever seen a Kentucky wooden war horse?"

He was not above fun-making and it seemed to him that the occasion called for it.

Webster's mother explained:

"One of the professors from the University lectured to them in April about birds. His head has been full of birds ever since: I shouldn't wonder if his dreams have been full of them." She looked at Webster not without ineradicable tenderness and pride; she could not quite have explained the pride, she could have explained the tenderness.

Now the truth of the matter was that since that memorable morning of the April talk at high school, she had been hearing from Webster repeatedly on that subject. He had told her of the lecture immediately upon reaching home; she had never seen him so wrought up. And from that time he had upon occasion plied her with questions: as to what she knew of birds when she lived in the country. She had to tell him that she knew very little; everybody identified the several species that preyed upon fruit and berries and young chickens; she named these readily enough. She had never heard of a bird called the Kentucky warbler. And she had never heard of Alexander Wilson.

All this she had duly narrated to Webster's father—greatly to his dejection. A bank officer with a solitary son, now graduated from high school, going after bird-nests—that was a prospect before such a father! He had shaken his head in silence that more than spoke.

"I told him," Webster's mother had concluded, "that the only Wilsons worth knowing in Kentucky were the horse-people Wilsons: of course we know them. It has been amusing to watch Elinor. Whenever Webster has begun about birds, if she has overheard him, she has made it convenient to settle somewhere near and listen. She would break in and stop his questions, but then there would be no more entertainment for her. She has been a study."

Thus Webster's father was not so ill-informed as he now appeared. In return for the information from Webster's mother, apparently for the first time imparted, he looked at his son with an expression which plainly meant that as a speculation the latter was becoming a graver risk.

"No, my son," he said, "I have never met your forest friend. I am merely a Kentucky bank warbler. One who did his warbling years ago. There is some war left in me. I suppose there will always be war left in me, but there isn't any war-ble. I warbled one distant solitary spring to your mother. She replied beautifully in kind and lavishly in degree. We made a nest and had a hatching. Since then the male bird has been trying—not to escape the consequences of his song—but to meet his notes like a man. I have never stumbled upon your forest friend."

Webster ate in silence for a few moments and then remarked, as though it were a matter of vital importance:

"His notes are:

"'Tweedle tweedle tweedle, Tweedle tweedle tweedle,' Wilson described them that way a hundred and six years ago."

"I don't doubt it, my son. I am not questioning your word—nor Mr. Wilson's. But I don't see anything very remarkable in that: if you come to the bank any day, you can hear men say the same thing. They come in and say, 'Tweedle.' And they go out."

Webster continued:

"Audubon described the notes as 'Turdle turdle turdle.'"

Deeper silence at the table. Webster continued in the face of the silence;

"A living naturalist says the notes may be:

"'Toodle toodle toodle.'"

Silence at the table still more deep. Webster broke it:

"Another naturalist describes the bird as saying:

"'Ter-wheeter wheeter wheeter wheeter wheeter.'"

The silence! Webster continued:

"Another naturalist thinks the song is:

"'Che che che peery peery peery.'"

Webster's father raised his eyebrows—he had no hair to raise—at Webster's mother: a sign that their graduate was beginning to celebrate his vacation.

"My son," he said, "when I was a little fellow in school, one of the reading lessons was a poem called 'Try, Try Again.' Perhaps the bird is working along that line."

"Thomas Jefferson followed a bird for hours in the woods," said Webster, with dignity: he somehow felt rebuked. "And for twenty years he tried to catch sight of another."

"Don't let me come between you and Thomas Jefferson," said Webster's father, waving his hand toward his son in protest. "God forbid that I should come between any two such persons as Daniel Webster and Thomas Jefferson!"

"The government at Washington," observed Webster stoutly, "is behind the Kentucky warbler."

"Then, my son, I advise you to get behind the Government."

The rusty bell at the little front door went off with a sound like the whirr of a frightened prairie chicken. The breakfast maid, also the cook, also the maid of all work, also a unit of the standardised population of disservice and discontent, entered and pushed a bill at Webster's father.

"The butcher," she announced with sullen gratification, "He's waiting."

As Webster's father left the table, he tapped his son affectionately on the head with his paper: "You follow the bird, my boy; and follow Thomas Jefferson, if you can. The butcher follows me."

Webster's mother sat watching him. He had begun to get his lunch ready. He held the bottom-half of a long, slender roll, which might have served as a miniature model for an old-time Kentucky river-ark; and with his knife, grasped like an oar, he was lining the inside with some highly specialised yellow substance. She deplored his awkwardness and fought his independence.

"Let me put up your lunch for you, my son!"

"I'll put it up."

He was not to be cheated out of that fresh sensation of pleasure which comes to the male, young or old, who tries to cook in camp, to fry, to boil, to season, or to serve things edible.

Webster pulled out of his pocket a crumpled piece of brown paper and smoothed it out on the table cloth. It showed butcher stains.

Webster's mother protested.

"My son! Take a napkin! Take this clean napkin for your lunch!"

"I like this paper."

The idea of being in the forest and unrolling his lunch from a napkin: what would Wilson have thought? Elinor, being "nice," always rolled her lunch in a napkin.

"But you will be hungry: let me get you some preserves!"

"Not anything sweet." Elinor always had preserves. He rolled his lunch roughly and thrust it, butcher-stains and all, into his pocket. His mother was exasperated and distressed.

"My son, your lunch will come loose in your pocket: I'll get you a string."

"I don't want a string." Elinor tied everything. Girls tied; boys buttoned. The difference between men and women was strings.

"But you'll get the grease on you, Webster! It will run down your legs!"

"Very well, then, I'll have greasy legs. Why not?"

She followed him out to the porch. Her character lacked capacity of initiative. She waited for him to be old enough to take some initiative; then she would stand by him.

"Don't go too far," she said tenderly, "and you ought to have some of your friends to go with you, some of the boys from school."

"They can't go today. Nobody can go today. Anybody would be in the way today."

He said this to himself.

She watched him from the porch and called: "Don't stay too late."

Webster walked quickly to the main corner of the block—Jenny's corner. On this first morning of being through with school and of feeling more like a man free to do as he pleased, Jenny for that reason became more important—he must see her before starting. Heretofore the pleasure of being with Jenny had definitely depended upon what Jenny might do; this morning the idea was beginning to be Jenny herself.

She was in her trumpet-vine arbour, the roof of which was already sun-dried. The shaded sides were still dew-wet. She bounded across to him, very exquisite in her light blue frock with broad, fresh white ribbons in her light-brown hair: healthy, docile, joyous, with innocent blue eyes and the complexion of apple blossoms.

"Where are you going?" she asked in a voice which implied that the day would be as pleasant, no matter where he went: nevertheless she had no thought of appearing indifferent to him.

He told her.

"What are you going into the woods for?" she inquired, with little dancing movements of her feet on the yard grass in irrepressible health and joy and with no especial interest in his reply.

He told her.

"Could you go?" He very well knew she could not and merely yielded to an impulse to express himself: he was offering to ruin the day for her.

"They wouldn't let me," said Jenny, apparently not disappointed at being thus kept at home.

He sought to make the best of his disappointment.

"Even if you could go, I am afraid you never would be quiet, Jenny."

"I'm afraid I wouldn't," Jenny replied, responsive to every suggestion.

He lingered, tenderly disturbed by her: the roots of the future were growing in him this morning. He was changing, he was changing her: there was an outreaching of his nature to draw her into the future alongside him.

Jenny suddenly stopped dancing and came closer to the fence, having all at once become more conscious of Webster, standing there as he had never stood before, looking at her as he had never looked. Her nature was of yielding sweetness, clasping trust. She glanced around the cottage windows: the situation was very exposed. Webster glanced at the cottage windows: the situation did not appear in the least exposed. Her eyes became more round with an idea:

"Are you coming back this way?"

"I will come back this way."

Jenny danced away from the fence, laughing excitedly: "Will it be late?"

"I can make it late?"

Webster climbed the fence of the forest under the foliage of a big tree of some unknown kind and descended waist-deep into the foliage of a weed with a leaf as big as an elephant's ear: it had a beautiful trumpet-shaped white and purple flower. He wished he knew what it was: on the very edge of the forest, at his very first step, he had sunk waist-deep into ignorance. Then he waded through the rank nightshade and stepped out upon the grass of the woods—the green carpet of thick turf, Kentucky bluegrass.

At last he was there under those softly waving trees which summer after summer he had watched from the porch and windows: long they had called to him and now he had answered their call.

But the disappointment! As he had looked at the forest across the distance, the tree-tops had made an unbroken billowy line of green along the blue horizon, continuous like the waves of the sea as he imagined the sea. Somewhere under that forest roof he had taken it for granted that there would be thick undergrowth, wild spots for shy singing nesting birds. The disappointment! The trees stood ten or twenty or thirty feet apart. The longest boughs barely touched each other, their lowest sometimes hung forty or fifty feet in the air. He did not see a tree whose branches he could reach with his upstretched arm. The sun shone everywhere under them every bright day and the grass grew thick up to their trunks.

Another disappointment! The wood was small. He walked to the middle of it and from there could see to its edge on each of its four sides. On one side was a field of yellow grain—what the grain was he did not know—ignorance again. On the side opposite this was a field of green grain—what he did not know. Straight ahead of him as he looked through the trees, he could see an open paddock on which the sunlight fell in a blazing sheen; it turned to silver the white flanks of some calves and made soft gold of the coats of grazing thoroughbreds. Beyond the paddock he could see stables and sheds and beyond these a farmhouse: he could faintly hear the cackle of barnyard poultry.

He stood in bluegrass pasture—once Kentucky wilderness. It was like an exquisite natural park. As he had skirmished toward the country along turnpikes with school-mates or other friends during his life, often his eyes had been drawn toward these world-famous bluegrass pastures. Now he was in one; and it was here that he had come to look for the warbler which haunts the secret forest solitudes!

He sat down under a big tree with a feeling of how foolish he had been. This was again followed by an overwhelming sense of his ignorance.

He did not know the kind of tree he sat under nor of any other that stood far or near. These were such as sugar maple and red oak and white oak and black ash and white ash and black walnut and white walnut—rarely white walnut—and hickory and locust and elm and a few haws: he did recognise a locust tree but then a locust tree grew in Jenny's yard! All around him weeds and wild flowers and other grasses sprang up out of the bluegrass: he did not know them.

There was one tree he curiously looked around for, positive that he should not be blind to it if fortunate enough to set his eyes on one—the coffee tree. That is, he felt sure he'd recognise it if it yielded coffee ready to drink, of which never in his life had they given him enough. Not once throughout his long troubled experience as to being fed had he been allowed as much coffee as he craved. Once, when younger, he had heard some one say that the only tree in all the American forest that bore the name of Kentucky was the Kentucky coffee tree; and he had instantly conceived a desire to pay a visit in secret to that corner of the woods. To take his cup and a few lumps of sugar and sit under the boughs and catch the coffee as it dripped down.... No one to hold him back ... as much as he wanted at last ...! The Kentucky coffee tree—his favourite in Nature!

He said to himself, looking all round him, that he had the outdoor loneliness and blindness of Silas Marner this wonderful morning.

Propped against the tree he sat still a while, thinking of the long day before him and of how he should spend it in this thin empty pasture, abandoned by the wild creatures. But as he deliberated, suddenly and then more and more he awoke to things going on around him.

A few feet away and on a level with his eyes a little fellow descended from high over-head. A little green gymnast trying to reach the ground by means of his own rope which he manufactured out of his body as he came down. How could he do it? How had he learned the very first time to make the rope strong enough to bear his weight instead of its giving way and letting him drop? Something seized one of Webster's ankles with a pair of small jaws like pincers and reminded him that his foot was in the way: it had better move on. A black ant suddenly rushed angrily over his knee. A cricket leaped in the grass. One autumn one of them had started its song behind the wainscoting, Elinor had pushed her toe against the woodwork and silenced it. A few feet away a bunch of white clover blossomed: a honey bee was searching it. Webster found on the back of one of his hands, which was pressed against the grass, a tiny crimson coach—a mere dot of a crimson coach being moved along he could not see how. The colour was most gorgeous and the material of the finest velvet. He let it go on its way across his hand withersoever it might be journeying. Directly opposite his eyes, some forty feet from the ground, was a round hole in a rotten tree-trunk. Webster wondered whether a bird ever pecked a square hole in anything. Suddenly from behind him a red-headed bird flew to the dead tree-trunk and alighted near the hole: he recognised the wood-pecker. And he remembered that this was the first bird Wilson had killed that first day he entered the American forest: he was glad that it was the first he encountered! No sooner had the wood-pecker alighted than the head of another bird appeared at the hole and the wood-pecker took to his heels—to his wings. Webster wished he had known what this other bird was: it had a black band across its chest and wore a speckled jacket and a dull reddish cap on the back of its head. A disturbance reached him from a nearby treetop, a wailing voice, a gulping sound, as if something up there were sick and full of suffering and were trying to take its medicine. He watched the spot and presently a crow flew out of the thick leaves: the crow's family seemed not in good health. A ground squirrel jumped to the end of a rotting log some yards away but at sight of him shrieked and darted in again. The whole pasture was alive.

Webster had all this time become conscious that another sound had been reaching his ear at regular intervals from the high branches of the trees, first in one place and then in another. His eyes had followed the voice but he could see no bird. The sound was like this:

Se—u—re?

That was the first half of the song—a question. A few moments later the other half followed, perhaps from another tree—the answer:

Se—u—u.

Here was a mystery: what was the bird? Could it be the bluebird!—his ignorance again, the comicality of his ignorance! Webster had never seen or heard a bluebird. He recalled what the professor had told them—that Alexander Wilson had written the first poem on the American bluebird, perhaps still the best poem; and he had given them the poem to memorise if they liked, saying that they might not think it good poetry, but at least it was the poetry of a man who thought he could criticise Robert Burns! Webster had memorised the verses and as he now searched the forest boughs for this invisible bluebird, he repeated to himself some of Wilson's lines:

Again that long fine strain cast far out upon the air like a silken reel:

Se—u—re? Se—u—u.

Or could it be a woodcock?

He got up by and bye and walked toward the field of yellow grain on one side of the pasture. Before he was halfway he stopped, arrested by a wonderful sound: from the top rail of the fence before him, separating the pasture from the grain, came a loud ringing whistle. It was Bobwhite! Boys at school sometimes whistled "bobwhite." He knew this bird because he had seen him hanging amid snow and ice and holly boughs outside meat shops about Christmas time. Here now was the summer song: in it the green of the woods, the gold of the grain, the far brave clearness of the June sky.

He tipped forward, not because his feet made any noise. Once again, nearer, that marvellous music rang past him, echoing on into the woods. Then it ceased; and as Webster approached the field fence what he saw was a rabbit watching him over the grass tops until with long soft leaps it escaped through the fence to the safety of the field.

For a while he remained leaning on this fence and looking out across the coming harvest. Twenty yards away a clump of alders was in bloom: some bird was singing out there joyously. It made a che che che sound, also; but its colour was brown.

The idea occurred to Webster that he would recross the pasture to the field on the other side and go on to the turnpike: one ran there, for he heard vehicles passing. He would make inquiry about some piece of forest further from the city. He remembered again what the professor told them:

"Some of you this summer during your vacation may go out to some nearby strip of woods—what little is left of the old forest—in quest of the warbler. Seek the wildest spots you can find. The Kentucky bluegrass landscape is thin and tame now, but there are places of thick undergrowth where the bird still spends his Kentucky summer. Shall I give you my own experience as to where I found him when a boy half a century ago? On my father's farm there was a woodland pasture. The land dipped there into a marshy hollow. In this hollow was a stock pond. Around the edges of the pond grew young cane. It was always low because the cattle browsed it. The highest stalks were scarcely five feet. On the edge of the canebrake a thicket of papaw and blackberry vines added rankness and forest secrecy. It was here I discovered him. The pale green and yellow of his plumage blent with the pale green and yellow of the leaves and stalks. But it was many years before I knew that the bird I had found was the Kentucky warbler. If I had only known it when I was a boy!"

When Webster reached the turnpike and looked up and down, no one was in sight. He sat on the fence and waited. By and bye, coming in from the country, a spring wagon appeared. Curious projections stuck out from the top and sides of boxes in the wagon. When it drew nearer Webster saw poultry being taken to market. He looked at the driver but let him pass unaccosted: there would be little use in applying for information about warblers at headquarters for broilers.

Next from the direction of the city he saw coming a splendid open carriage drawn by a splendid horse and driven by a very pompous coloured coachman in livery. An aristocratic old lady sat in the carriage, shielding her face from the dazzling sunlight with a rich parasol. She leaned out and looked curiously at Webster.

"Suydam," she called out to her coachman with a voice that had the faded sweetness of faded rose leaves, "did you notice that remarkable boy? He looked as though he would have liked to drive with me out into the country. I wish I had invited him to do so."

A milk cart followed with a great noise of tin cans. With milk carts Webster felt somewhat at home: it was often his business to receive the family milk. As the cart was passing, he motioned for the milkman to stop. Perhaps all milkmen stop at any sign: there may be an order: Webster called out with a good deal of hesitation:

"Do you know of a woods further out full of bushes and thickets?"

The milkman gave a little flap of the rein to his horse:

"What's the matter with you?" he said with patient forbearance:

Finally Webster saw creeping down the turnpike toward him an empty wagon-bed drawn by a yoke of oxen. A good-natured young negro man sat sideways on the wagon-tongue, smoking. Webster halted him by a gesture and a voice of command:

"Do you know of a bushy woods further out?"

Any negro enjoys being questioned because he enjoys not answering questions. Most of all he enjoys any puzzling exercise of his mother wit.

"A bushy woods?"

"Yes, a bushy woods."

"What do you want with a bushy woods?"

"I want to find where there is one."

The negro hesitated: "there's a bushy woods about four miles out."

"Is it on the pike?"

"On the pike! Did you ever see a bushy woods on the pike? It's beside the pike."

"Right side or left side?"

"Depends which way you're going. Right side if you are going out, left side if you're coming in."

"You say it's four miles out?"

"You pass the three mile post and then you go a little further."

"Are there any birds in it?"

"Birds? There's owls in it. There's coons in it."

"Do you know a young canebrake when you see one?"

"I know an old hempbrake when I see one."

Webster enjoyed his new authority in holding up his negro and questioning him about a forest. And it seemed to him that the moment had come when it was right to use money if you had it, horns or no horns. He pulled out a dime. The negro, too surprised to speak, came across and received it. He declined to express thanks but felt disposed to show that he had earned the money by repeating a piece of information:

"It's four miles out."

"Is there much of it?"

"Much of it? Much as you want."

"Do you live in it?"

"No, I don't live in it: I live in a house."

He had retaken his seat on the wagon-tongue.

"What kind of pipe stem is that you are using?"

"What kind? It's a cane pipe stem."

"Where did you get the cane?"

"Where did I get it? I got it in the woods."

"Then there is young cane growing in the woods?"

"Who said there wasn't?"

Webster, beginning this morning to use his eyes, took notice of something which greatly interested him as the wagon moved slowly off down the pike: strands of hemp clung to it here and there like a dry hanging moss. The geologist had told them that his own boyhood lay far back in the era of great Kentucky hemp-raising. Much of the hemp was broken in March, the month of high winds. As the hemp-breakers busily shook out their handfuls while separating the fibre from the shard, strands were carried away on the roaring gales, lodging against stubble and stumps and fences of the fields or blown further on into the pastures. Later when it was baled and hauled in, other filaments were caught on the rafters and shingles of hemp-houses and barns. Thus when in April the northward migration of birds reached Kentucky, this material was everywhere ready and plentiful, and the Baltimore orioles on the bluegrass plateau built their long hanging nests of Kentucky hemp.

Webster, sitting on the fence and thinking of this, meantime laid his plans for the larger adventure of the following day: the clue he sought had unexpectedly been found: he would go out to the place where young cane grew: there he might have a real chance at the warbler.

This being settled to his satisfaction, he hurried impatiently back to his woodland pasture. It had seemed empty of living creatures when he entered it; soon it had revealed itself as a whole teeming world. The mere green carpet of the woods was one vast birthplace and nursery, concert hall, playground, battlefield, slaughter-pen, cemetery.

"But my ignorance!" he complained. "I have good strong eyes, but all these years they have been required to look at dead maps, dead books, dead pencils and figures, dead everything: not once in all that time have they been trained upon the study of a living object."

His ears were as ignorant as his eyes: he had not been educated to hear and to know what he heard. Innumerable strange sounds high and low beat incessantly on them—wave upon wave of louder and fainter melodies, the summer music of the intent and earnest earth. And everywhere what fragrances! The tonic woody smells! Each deep breath he drew laved his lungs with sun-clean, leaf-sweet atmosphere. Hour after hour of this until his whole body and being—sight, smell, hearing, mind and spirit—became steeped in the forest joyousness.

Now it was alone in the June woods that long bright afternoon that Webster took final account of the last wonderful things the geologist had told them that memorable morning. He pondered those sayings as best he could, made out of them what he could:

That long sunny afternoon in the June woods! The shadows of the trees slowly lengthened eastward. The sun sank below the forest boughs and shot its long lances against the tree trunks. It made a straight path of gold, deeper gold, across the yellow grain. The sounds of life died away, the atmosphere grew sweeter with the odours of leaves and grasses and blossoms.

Webster recrossed the woods as he had entered it, waded through the nightshade and climbed the fence under the dark tree.

It was twilight when he entered the City.

As he passed her yard, Jenny bounded across to him joyous, innocent, tender, in a white frock with fresh blue ribbons in her brown hair.

"Did you find him?" she asked, her happiness not depending on his answer.

"It was not the right place. Tomorrow I am going out further into the country to a better place."

"The humming-bird has been here," Jenny announced with an air of saying that she had been more successful as a naturalist.

He made no reply: as the veteran observer of a day, he had somewhat outgrown the trumpet-vine arbour and the ruby-throat.

He lingered close to the fence. Jenny lingered. He moved off, disappointed but devoid of speech.

"Come back!" Jenny whispered, with reproach and vexation.

It was the first invitation. It was the first acceptance of an invitation. There would have been a second acceptance but the invitation was not there to accept.

When Webster turned in at his home gate, everything was just as he had foreseen: his father sat on one side of the porch, smoking the one daily cigar; his mother faced him from the opposite side, slowly rocking. Elinor crouched on the top step between them: he would have to walk around her or over her.

His father laughed heartily as he sauntered up.

"Well, my son, where is your game bag? What have you brought us for breakfast?"

Webster looked crestfallen: he returned empty-handed but not empty-minded: he had had a great rich day; they thought it an idle wasted one.

"Some of the boys have been here for you," said his mother. "They left word you must be certain to meet them, in the morning for the game. Freshen yourself up and I'll give you your supper."

Elinor said nothing—a bad sign with her. She sat with her sharp little chin resting on her palms and with her eyes on him with calculating secrecy. He stepped around her.

His room had never seemed so cramped after those hours in the woods under the open sky. The whole cottage seemed so unnatural, everything in the City so unnatural, after that day in the forest.

At supper he had not much to say; his mother talked to him:

"I put my berries away to eat with you for company." They ate their berries together.

He felt tired and said he would go to bed. His room was darkened when he returned to it; he felt sure he had left his lamp burning; someone had been in it. He lighted his lamp again.

As he started toward his window to close the shutters, his eye caught sight of an object hanging from the window sash. A paper was pinned around it. The handwriting was Elinor's. It was a bluejay, brought down by a lucky stone from some cottager's hand. Webster read Elinor's message for him:

"Your favourite Kentucky Warbler,

From your old friend,

Thomas Jefferson."

He sat on the side of his bed. The sights and sounds and fragrances of the pasture were all through him; the sunlight warmed his blood still, the young blood of perfect health.

He turned in for the night and sleep drew him away at once from reality. And some time during the night he awoke out of his sleep to the reality of a great dream.