“Good morning, Daytime!” A girl stood upon the gray stone steps of a Lenox mansion and, looking up, answered the first lovely smile that young day flung down to her as, robed in pale pink and bluish bloom, it slowly climbed the eastern sky.

“Good morning, Day-sky!” she laughed again—smiling all over in response to that pink of beauty above her. “Well! this is the first time that the Sunrise and I have been chums,” she murmured to herself, “the first spring, I mean; I—I who used to suffer from the sleepy fevers more than—than the ‘nappiest’ little flower in my garden.”

She laughed softly now, Una Grosvenor, known to her girl chums as Jack—a gay bit of satire, by the way—and by the Council Fire as U-te-yan, Flower, as she descended the gray steps into a dewy garden, where those Rogues O’May, the late spring flowers, were still, many of them, slumbering with eyes tight shut.

“Yes, you gain an hour by the daylight saving—or you think you do, you sluggards!” she flung at them, a slight nearsighted peculiarity in her dark eye flashing with pretty mockery. “Six o’clock, now, by my watch—really only five—and there you are: chicory, tulip, wild rose, pond lily, fast asleep still; poppy, marigold, daisy—and wild dandelion, only just awaking—and one little belated Crocus, just one, dozing, too!”

It was with a smile, roguish and tender, tender as that of the dawn, that Una stood still, cooling her toes in the dew, to look at her garden—with its cheek, silver and pink as a baby’s, reflecting the flush of the sky.

A large, old-fashioned garden it was and full of surprises, inclosing U-te-yan’s blooming beds where, as a Camp Fire Girl, she had sown or planted, experimented and transplanted herself; and it was plain from the look upon her face that she lived in it—dreamed in it, as a princess might live in a fairy tale.

“My flowers!” She dimpled imaginatively. “Oh-h! at this hour, I can almost hear them singing to me. What is it—they—say? I made it up, for them, before:

“Good morning! Good morning!” threw back the caroling sprite, her dark eyes dressing themselves up in light, too, as she impersonated her flowers. “Now! what was it I wanted especially to do this morning,” thus she silently questioned the dewy beds, “besides watching the sleepy flowers open in my flower clock, my sundial bed—that’s the clock which really gets me up early,” with a merry nod, “to study their waking time, as the shadow of the dial hand, beginning to move with sunrise, points to one after the other? Oh-h! I know; I wanted to do some transplanting, ‘housemove’ my little Quaker Ladies, before—before old Sods gets around. Now! did any of you ever hear of such a thing as a crusty old gardener whose ‘really truly’ name is—Jacob Sods?”

Whimsically she interrogated pansy and little blue johnny-jump-up, just opening its sleepy eye, daffodil, narcissus and lamp-like geranium which, open-eyed, had kept vigil all night long.

“Humph! There he is now! I never can get ahead of him.” The girl shrugged her shoulders.

“Lorie me! Miss Una,” grunted an old mountaineer who at that moment came shuffling down a garden path, spade in hand and munching a dew-piece, a hunch of bread. “Lorie me! Now, what be you up for so ear-rly! It ben’t but—five—o’clock.” He pulled a timeworn old silver watch out of a side pocket.

“Six—by—me!” Una glanced at her tiny jeweled wrist watch.

“Humph! I go by the Lord’s time, I’ll have you to know!” snorted Jacob Sods, gardener. “I—I ain’t no ‘nose o’ wax’ to be changin’ round.” He shuffled on, grunting.

Una’s tickled laughter rang out as she set to work to transplant her little Quaker Ladies from what was known as the wildflower garden to a sunny rock bed.

“A plant—a plant is a regular tomboy when you’re making a new home for it,” she was murmuring archly to herself, five minutes later, her dark eyebrows lifting over the busy trowel. “You have to make a nice little mound of earth, deep in your hole, for it to sit on and swing its legs, its roots, just like a boy or girl. And—and it likes a snug fit, too! There now, my bluets are in a nice, comfy hole.... And the little Quaker Ladies will never know what happened to them!”

She started. Something was happening to her. Breathlessly she kneeled upright—earthy knuckles pressed against her lips, ear intent.

“Goodness! this—this isn’t the first time when I’ve been up early, before anybody else was around—Pemrose, anybody—that—I thought—I thought I heard a strange sound from the wood. There it is again! Faint hum—silvery hum—all round us in the air! Don’t you—don’t you hear it?”

She turned half wildly to the Quaker Ladies, who seemed to be settling into their new home to music—if music the faintest, vaguest murmur could be called.

“It—it comes from the wood, but it isn’t the trees—pines or beeches—it isn’t, oh! it isn’t any sound in Nature, at all.” Una waved her trowel, in utter bewilderment. “What can be doing it—making it? That distant ‘surgy’ hum, rising, falling, murmur, murmuration! Silvery murmuration!” The little peculiar cast in her fascinated eye, too slight to be a blemish, shone, a morning star of marvel, now as she gazed off towards a low, stone wall about a hundred feet away, beyond which was a dark, slowly lighting pine wood.

“If I were to say anything about this to Pemrose, she’d laugh at me—think it was all imagination. She’s—so different. Full of ‘pep’—a radio amateur!”

The girl, the dark-eyed girl whose nature was more woven of poetry than “pep”, who put morning songs into the heads of her flowers, continued to kneel “possessed”, upon a dew-silvered stone beside the rock garden, continued to stare, bewitched, at the dusky green of the early wood.

To her, the vague, sweet murmur which, like a silver cloud, enwrapped her, was not unnatural; it was part of the fairy wonder of the sunrise; of a May sun rising, dim and silvery, like a moon—like a young moon calf—behind shrubbery trees.

“Extra-ordinary!” Her earthy fingers sought each other, restlessly intertwining. “It can’t be a bee? Big, droning bumble bee—Canny Nannie, as the mountain children call it! A whole swarm of Canny Nannies! But there isn’t a bee in sight at this hour; and, if there were, ’twould have to be a glorified—glorified one for me to hear it—at this distance from the wood.”

She stumbled to her feet now, dropping the trowel almost upon the long-suffering heads of the Quaker Ladies, and wandered down a dewy pathway towards a point still nearer to the pine woods, where a gray old sundial upon its four-foot pedestal, shimmered at sunrise, like a huge primrose.

Around this U-te-yan, Flower had created her masterpiece, a ring-like bed in three-cornered sections, peopled only by horological flowers, as her books called them, those that closed sleepily at night, to open at various hours of the morning, energetically or lazily, as the case might be.

To the lovely flower clock, the blooming democracy, wild flowers, even weeds, were admitted, side by side with garden aristocrats, in order to find a flower, sometimes two or three, whose waking or sleeping habits corresponded to the numbers upon the dial’s face—to the sunny hours counted out by the pointing of the shadowy dial finger.

The flower clock had suddenly developed a tongue. The vague hum pursued her here. Pale, spring poppy, uncurling dandelion, caught it, held it—and winked at her over its mystery.

“If—if I were Pemrose now, I’d go right on into the wood, and find out where it comes from—what’s making it,” she murmured to those waking flowers. “The truth is, I’m too—t-too ‘funky’,” with a little deprecatory shrug. “That—that’s why father won’t hear of my going hiking, camping with the other girls this summer; he says I never would stand the sleeping out at night—even for a few nights. And Treff, my madcap cousin Treff, says I’d be such a ‘weer’ I’d turn them all ‘wuzzy’,”—a low laugh—“his barbarous college slang!

“He—he’s coming over to take Pemrose for a little flight, this morning, a little ‘air-hop’, as he calls it, before breakfast. I—I daren’t go up with him in his aËroplane, to hear voices among the clouds—his new radio outfit. That must be weird. But—this is weirder!” The girl’s lips curved silently. “And yet—and yet that’s not the word, either; it’s too sweet. Gracious! Now I hear it, now I d-don’t.” She stole forward a step, bending her ear towards the intoning pines.

“Now—now it’s like a wandering organ note. Oh! am I listening in on anything by radio—a new sort of radio ‘bug’?” with the faintest whiff of laughter. “Am I awake, at all? I’d give worlds—worlds—to go on into the wood, find out what it is—what’s making it. But I’ve seldom been into that pine wood, alone. Never—at this hour.”

Yet, as if that dulcet, wavy murmur, now high-pitched, now low-pitched, faint, yet audible—increasingly audible—in the still May morning, were a luminous belt, an irresistible power-belt, drawing her, Una was moving slowly—vaguely—towards the wood.

She reached the low stone wall—the dark skirts of the passive pines were only fifty feet away.

Each gray stone in that rough wall was now a ruby, reflecting the wonderful amethyst lights in the sky—wings of that mild young sun which had risen so like a moon calf.

Suddenly her hands clutched each other convulsively. Was she masquerading, too? The morning had, all in a moment, become dim; and she was the ghost of a girl standing down, in a mist, by a seashore—holding a hollow sea shell to her ear.

“I can’t—oh! I can’t be happy—unless I find out what’s doing it!”

She sobbed it aloud, now, in light, breathless, seafoam sobs—all irradiated, too—to the dewy flowers among which she stood; gay cottage tulips straggling among sweetbriars along by the wall, each red and yellow mite flashing as if, true to its legend, it had rocked a little elf in its cradle the night before.

There was not a flower in the garden whose legend was not in Una’s flower-basket brain.

This soft sea shell throbbing of the air about her, the faint, shrill piping—now, again, it was high, clear, metallic—yet strangely disembodied—fitted in with a dozen of them.

“It’s not earthly; it’s not,” she cried passionately to the tulips; “it’s t-too fairy-like—too unlike anything I ever heard ... but I can’t be happy, unless—”

A sweetbriar, herself, now, the unfinished protest a thorn in her brain, she was over the low wall—and through the dim shadow gate of the wood.