What is the first wild flower of the spring? Each of us has his own first flower. It varies with the locality and the special season. Here it was the hepatica, that lifted its little faintly blushing face from the edge of a patch of melting snow. I plucked it, remembering the words of Old Kate, at Les Rapides: “Ef you pluck yer first flower and kill yer first snake, you’ll prevail over yer enemies for the comin’ year.”

I did not trouble her poor mind by inquiring: “What if your enemy is also plucking his first flower and killing his first snake. Who, then, would prevail?”

I know of no enemy, but I gathered the hepatica. Whether I shall kill the snake remains a matter of doubt. If it is old Josephine, who will soon be sunning herself on a flat rock at the bathing beach, I will not. That snake has been a friend of mine too long.

After the hepatica came the dicentra cucularia, or Dutchman’s breeches—a wide patch of them, nodding from a shaded ledge of rock, and then the trillium, lifting its white chalices by thousands through the woods. If Saint Patrick had known the trillium, I cannot think that he would ever have chosen the shamrock as his emblem of the Trinity. The golden-throated flower rises three-petaled from a cup of three green sepals. Below this is an inch or so of thick, green stem and below that the leaves, three in a whorl. So three and three and three says the plant with every part of its being.

The air is full of the spring songs of birds and the dry whir of innumerable wings. A colony of gold finches moved in last night, and they are singing like hundreds of canaries in the cedars. “Konker-ree,” call the redwings over in the meadow. “Purity-purity,” sings the bluebird, and “Quick-quick-quick,” snaps the flicker. Busy brown sparrows slip through the dry leaves. On an oak tree the woodpecker is playing his xylophone, sounding a different note on each branch that he strikes with his little red hammer.

From the drowned lands come the boom of the frogs and the rattling signal of the kingfisher, and to-day—the seventeenth of April—I heard the first call of the returning loons. The water is very still, with schools of pin-long striped fishes swimming in the sunny shallows.

The leaves came out in a night. One evening there was only a purple haze over the bare twigs, and the next day the swollen buds had burst out into a very vehemence of leafage, and all the woods were green. The fields on the mainland also turned green that day, and on the island the wild cherry blossoms opened in drifts of white, that loaded all the branches.

With all this newness out of doors, the thought of fresh foods possessed me and I started forth on a foraging expedition, to find out whether the hens had waked to their duty, and whether the cows were ready to give milk again. Verily I was aweary of tinned milk, stored eggs, and packed foods of all varieties. So I took the skiff and started for the Jacksons’.

The Jackson farmhouse stands on a high hill, commanding the lake. From her kitchen door Anna Jackson can see every boat that passes. Therefore, long before one comes to shore, she is ready, wearing a frilled tea apron and a welcoming smile, when the panting visitor comes toiling up the steep slope from the landing. To-day the winds were contrary and I took her unaware, by creeping along the shore in the lee, and Anna, in her work dress, was digging stones out of the garden.

Grandma Jackson was knitting beside the stove in the sunny kitchen. A peddler, a low voiced, dark-eyed young Jew, sat in the corner. At my entrance he began unpacking his big oilcloth-covered case, drawing out aprons, handkerchiefs, shirtwaists, stockings, until the floor was strewn with its contents. Every article that one could name seemed stowed away in that great pack—enough to have stocked a small department store. When all had been displayed he began putting them away again.

“That’s all what I got,” he said with a patient smile. Presently he shouldered his load and walked away, bending under its weight. We heard him coughing as he passed through the gate.

These peddlers begin their travels with the spring, being heralded by the telephones all along the line. It seems impossible that they should make a living, but I suppose they do, for, after being shut in for a long winter, few women can resist buying a ribbon or some lace when it is brought to the very door.“That feller won’t sleep at Joshua White’s to-night,” quoth Grandma Jackson, watching the stooping figure out of sight. “All tramps and peddlers and such like always put up at Joshua’s. He’d give them all a supper and a bed.”

But Joshua White died yesterday, and his house was the “wake house” now, for they still have wakes in this country—when the neighbors gather to condole with the bereaved, extol the virtues of the deceased, and partake of supper at midnight, when the whisky and the clay pipes are passed around. In this case there would be no difficulty about praising the dead man. Joshua White was a man of good standing, and wide charity, a good neighbor and a kind friend. The community mourned his loss.

“Joshua was an awful proud man too,” said Grandma. “Do you think that he would ever carry a handkerchief with a colored border? Well, I guess not.”

At that moment the telephone bell rang.

“Gran,” said Anna, after a moment’s conversation, “Mary wants to know the age of Alec’s eldest boy. Can you tell her?”

“I dunno,” answered Mrs. Jackson. “Let me see. No, I can’t remember. Ask Mary haven’t they got some old horse or cow that they can reckon by? There’s always some old critter on every farm that they counts the young ones’ ages by. Alec’s Charley was born the spring they bought old Nance. They must know how old she is.”

Just then the three Jackson children came in from school, with their bags of books and little tin dinner pails. There was no running or shouting; they sat down quietly at table. Six-year-old Beryl’s small face was pale and grave. She had started that morning at seven o’clock, had walked four miles to school, had sat all day on a hard bench with her little feet dangling. At noon she had eaten her dinner of cold potatoes, “bread and jell,” cake and pie, and at four o’clock she had started home again, trudging those four long, muddy miles to a put-away supper. No wonder she looked subdued. She was tired in mind and in her frail, small body, but she is getting an education. Beryl is at the head of her class. She tells you this with a little grown-up air.

It seems a topsy-turvey thing, this way of keeping schools open during the winter, when only the children living close to the schoolhouses can reach them through the snowdrifts and the mud, and closing them in summer when the roads are good. I should turn things the other way round, and give the long holiday in winter; but I am told that my plan would never do. The farmers need the children. So in the rural districts the weeks spent at lessons are few. It is only in the spring and fall that the children can go to school and there is no such thing as “regular attendance,” that bugbear of public instruction.

After all, I fancy that the youngsters learn as much while they toss the hay in the clean, hot meadows, or when they drive the cattle along the shady roads to the lakes, as they would if penned in the little one-room houses, where some eighteen-year-old girl, just from high school, struggles with the work of all the grades at once.

This thing of getting an education is a mighty matter in Canada. The roads are dotted with schoolhouses, the papers have long columns of advertisements for teachers, and it is always specified as to whether Catholic or Protestant is needed. It seems the dear ambition of each family to produce at least one teacher, and the Normal School at Queensport turns them out by the score. On Monday mornings and Friday afternoons vehicles of every description travel to and from town, taking the girls home for Sundays and back for the week’s work.

Students hire a room in Queensport for two dollars a month, and with it goes the privilege of cooking on the family stove and sitting in a warm room to study. Those who live near enough to town bring their food from home, so food costs them nothing. Thus they work their difficult way through to the little country schools.

My neighbor, Mrs. Spellman, is doubly proud, for her two daughters are teaching, one in Alberta, the other in far-away British Columbia.

“It was hard work to give them their training,” she says. “Their father had no patience with the notion of sending them to high school, so he wouldn’t help. But I made up my mind that they should have their chance. They’d not be tied down to a farm all their days, as I’ve been. Mary, my eldest, was always such a home girl too. She wouldn’t hear of leaving me until I promised that she should come home every week. There wasn’t anyone to drive her to town and back but me, but I seen to it that she got home. Every Friday noon I’d harness up and go for her, coming back long after dark. Every Monday morning I’d be up before day, to feed the horse and cook breakfast in time to take her back to school again, and she never was late. I always had her there by nine o’clock. Sometimes the roads were so dark that I’d drive all the way with the reins in my two hands. I was afraid to hold them in the one hand lest I should get them crossed in the darkness and pull the horse out of the road and into the drifts. I’d feel sometimes as though my hands was frozen. But I never missed a week all those two long years. When Nellie, my second girl, went, it wasn’t so hard for me. The two stayed in Queensport together, and they didn’t get so homesick. Yes, it was a hard pull, but I’d do it all over again, for my children did well. They stood at the head of their class. I’m proud of them when they come home, summers.”

I have often wondered at these little schoolma’ams, with their youth, their high spirits, and their wholly innocent love of pretty clothes and beaux and good times. They have to board at one house and another, accustoming themselves to all sorts of food, all kinds of families. They must toil through rough weather to their work. They must learn to please all parents, to conciliate school boards and supervisors. They must have sense to steer a difficult way through neighborhood prejudice and to avoid giving rise to gossip. A task for a strong woman, it has always seemed to me, but I wonder no longer that so many succeed in it, since I know something of the strength of the mothers who stand behind them.