And open at the sun’s first ray.”

It was Una, a bell-shaped white flower, striped with pink, the light, filmy costume divided into the three-lobed corolla and five-sepaled calyx of the erratic little wild flower which, in traveling, always goes in a contrary direction to its sun-god, although it rises with him—Una, trailing triangular green leaves, who came floating on to the outdoor stage.

Spectators wildly cheered the girl Morning Glory as she flung her green tendrils over a rock, symbol of beauty, indigenous beauty, to eyes tired with fighting Nature for a farm-hold in a region where Mother Earth seemed at times to set her foot down grimly and say: “Here, I don’t want men, houses, corn fields; I want my uncut forests, boulders—untamed mountains.”

“Ain’t it a purty play-act, though—a dum fine show?” gasped the old farmer who had “come, within the breadth of a cow’s thumb of shooting her” when he believed her flower-like feet to be those which had walked off in his floral slippers.

“Gosh! when, at early mornin’ the sweat’s rolling off’n a man, grubbing up rocks an’ stumps, and each one taken out means a fresh back ache, I dunno as I’ll miss the little morning glory trailin’ over the rock—jest opening its eye to the sun—seems as if, from now on, I’d see an’ not trample on it,” he murmured pathetically to himself.

“Well, it’s rising sunblink now, Si. Look!” said his wife beside him—his impressionable wife, who had on what he called her prim, muslin mouth that went with her Sunday dress—she pointed to the glaring mock-sun rising, red, flamboyant, behind pine tree and beech that, formed the background of the natural stage.

While in a bosky dell Treff Graham played Sun Father, manipulating those flamboyant effects, obtained by wiring the backs of the trees for electricity, in a twilight that by a long stretch of the imagination might be made to serve as dawn, not evening, another horological flower of those that favor the sand-man, was murmuring her winsome Reveille.

“Daisy! Day’s Eye!” applauded the farmers’ wives delightedly, as fair-haired Dorothy flitted forth through the artificial sun-gates, a lovely composite of white ray florets rimming a shining, yellow heart.

While the Guardian, in lacy white as tall meadow-sweet, queen of the meadow, was explaining to rustic ears—of which about fifty pairs, in all, had assembled in the open-air theatre—that the yellow heart was a whole flower family in miniature, another girl, in azure, glided from behind a beech tree on to the stage with its borrowed plumes.

“Wayside friend—mark ye! Wal! I wouldn’t say that she hasn’t got her wish—would you?” The farmer—the farmer who would no more trample upon the morning glory—winked slyly, nudged his wife, jerked his thumb in the direction of broad tables among the trees, whose ware and glass suggested junketing as well as pageantry.

“That’s you, Si; always thinking o’ foddering!” expostulated his wife—the wife who succumbed to spell-women and “fore-goes.” “Dear me sass! what have we here—golden mouse-ear.” She expanded into delight. “I was a-picking of it in the woods only yesterday an ’twill light ’em on into September—devil’s paint brush the children call it.”

It was Lura who, as tawny hawkweed, that wild flower of many nicknames, delivered this account of herself—her “copper nob” shining as burnt orange, indeed.

Dandelion, poppy, humble chickweed, lovely wild rose, field marigold, pimpernel, others—all the sleepy flowers that favor the sand-man—were represented.

But, as they were for the most part early risers, it was the one thorn in the wild bouquet to Una, whose fÊte this was, that she could not have a perfect representation of her garden flower clock—to find a flower whose awaking corresponded to each number upon the sundial she had to turn to garden aristocrats.

But when early pond lily, late evening primrose blended together in the dance, the final dance of breeze-blown wild flowers, going through the pretty pantomime of falling asleep—nodding—heads upon each other’s shoulders, the thorn was sheathed.

“Oh! hasn’t it been a success? As long as I live I shall love to think of this—my sixteenth birthday.” Una clung adoringly to the Guardian, a lovely Morning Glory, tender, dreamy, her eyes going down among the spectators to single out faces of little children, mountain children to whom even a moving picture display was a rare treat. “They’re all on tiptoe for the ice cream now,” she said, feeling little pulses in her throat at the pleasure she was giving. “But—what’s that?”

Was there a bee in the bouquet—the wild flower bouquet? Had every honeybee that visited the real flowers upon the mountain that day, in return for sweets acquired, stored up in the blossoms its hum, to be reproduced this evening?

From behind the scenes stole a murmur, faint at first, swelling, surging, until the air was full of it—that elfin hum.

“Oh-h! where is it coming from—now?” Una stiffened distractedly, shivering—blanching.

“Patience—just for a moment, darling!” said the Guardian—and put an arm round her.

“The—the Murmuration, by heck!” the old farmer was exclaiming: “Is it a bee-hive, a wild bees’ nest, anywheres near?” He started up, staring everywhere in the gloaming. “No-o, ba gosh! ’tain’t any bee swarm—bee tree—it’s too sweet. Sweet as honey from St. Peter’s garden!”

In the gloaming he looked half-wild.

“Sit down—you fool!” His wife caught him by the coat-tails; her prim muslin mouth was all pleats and puckers, as if she could tell the source of the honeyed hum, if she would—and that it did hail from St. Peter’s garden—wasn’t earthly.

Other of the farmers’ wives shared her air of awe—of mystery—as if the air held something untellable—but, for them, not quite unfamiliar.

The fascination grew upon their faces as the silvery murmuration became a wild, sweet, wandering organ-note—a faint piping, as of elfin singing, trembling off into inaudibility over spell-bound heads—while rough hands clutched at the air, as if, could they but reach up high enough, they could bring it back again.

“Gosh! I’m bewiddied—I am,” gasped the farmer, beginning to think that, possibly, his wife had more insight than he had.

Upon his bewilderment broke a laugh—elfin in its mischief, but human.

Forth from the background of trees danced a girl—a girl arrayed as a bluebell—a mountain harebell.

She carried a rather heavy box which she set down behind the footlights—among the quivering Wild Flowers. She pressed a button. The stage—all the open-air theatre for a couple of hundred feet around—became a reverberating sea shell. Another! All the elves in Christendom were piping!

“Behold,” cried Pemrose Lorry, “the source of the elfin music; a simple arrangement of tuning forks, magnets and a battery!... There, Unie, isn’t that what you heard, last night?”

“It sounds like it,” admitted Una doubtfully, her pulses galloping, beginning to gallop, as she thought of the Lenox garden at home.

“Weird enough in the gloaming—eh?” laughed a youth who knelt by Pemrose, flourishing his hands as if he were pulling the joy-stick in his plane. “Oh! we’re proud of our fairy music, pipes of Pan—anything you like to call it—we had a great time rigging them up, after I got back with the stuff. You see the forks—there are two pairs here, one low-pitched, the other high and shrill—are not in tune, not quite of the same pitch, each pair, so that when that pair is set vibrating, the magnet between them carrying the sound, it—it makes a wave with a hump in it,” gleefully, “that hollow sea shell crooning—elfin ringing.”

“But how—how did you hit it off, clever children?” The Guardian was flatly gasping.

“Oh-h, such an old story to me,” dimpled Pemrose, “being brought up in a laboratory! Father has every musical fork imaginable—experiments with them—up to those brittle quartz ones which, set vibrating, give an angel’s note, so pure and high. Some of them he loved to take out of doors, at times, and match the pitch against Nature’s sounds. We’ve tried it in the woods—and often down by the seashore, where we could almost—almost hit it off with the tide—have a duet in the same key,” laughingly. “But—up here—who could have been doing it?”

“Some eccentric musician with the same hobby,” suggested the Guardian. “There are camps here and there upon the mountain.”

The girl nodded. “Dad hasn’t tried it for a long time now, our pipes o’ Pan,” she said, with a tremble in her triumph—her face blue-lit, as always when she spoke of her father. “He has been all taken up with his inventions. But, sometimes—before—if I teased him, he’d take those rare, wavy quartz tuning forks along, with their sound that nothing in Nature could match, so pure, so crystal-clear it was! Heavenly!” The blue eyes dimmed. “Perhaps, whoever was playing with it, last night—playing Pied Piper....” She glanced at Una. “But who was playing—with—it?” Passionately the question forced itself again.

From the low-pitched tuning forks was suddenly struck a murmur, vague, unaccountable, carried by some magnet into her finger tips, her toes: “I wish—I wish Una’s Father and Mother were back,” it said.