if she had heard them. It was not food that she wanted,
not the game and oysters and fish over which these old gourmands gloated.
What she wanted was the nectar and ambrosia of life, the color and
glow--the companionship of young things like herself!

Of course there were the school children and there was Peggy. But to the
children and Peggy she was a grown-up creature. Loving her, they still
made her feel age's immeasurable distance, as she had felt her own
distance from the Old Gentlemen.

It was Peggy, who, wound in her mother's knitted white shawl until she
looked like a dingy snowball, bounced from the kitchen to meet her.

"Where are you going?" she asked.

The young teacher laughed. "Peggy," she said, "if you will never tell,
you may come with me."

"Where?" demanded Peggy.

"Across the road and into the woods and down to the river."

"What are you carrying the wreaths for?"

"Wait and see."

The road which they crossed was the railroad. Over the iron rails the
trains thundered from one big city to another, with a river to cross just
before they reached Peter Bower's. Very few of the trains stopped at
Peter's, and it was this neglect of theirs, and the consequent isolation,
which constituted the charm of Bower's for town-tired folk. Yet Anne
Warfield always wished that some palatial express might tarry for a
moment to take her aboard, and whirl her on to the world of flashing
lights, of sky-scraping towers and streaming crowds.

"What are you going to do with the wreaths?" Peggy was still demanding as
they entered upon the frozen silence of the pine woods.

"I am going down as close as I can to the water's edge, and I am going to
fling them out as far as I can into the river. And perhaps the river will
carry them down to the sea, and the sea will say, 'Whence came you?' and
the wreaths will whisper, 'We came from the forest to die on your breast,
the river brought us, and the winds sang to us, and above us the sky
smiled. And now we are ready to die, for we have seen life and its
loveliness. It would have been dreadful if we had come to our end in the
ashes of a little round stove.'"

Peggy stared, open-eyed. She had missed the application, but she liked
the story.

"Let me throw one of them," she said.

"You couldn't throw them far enough, dear heart. But you shall count,
'one, two, three' for me. And when you say 'three' I'll throw one of them
away, and then you must count again, and I will thr