re it was improving. He thought he could
clean the paint cup, but he imagined the harness oil one would require
baking also.

As he stood busily working over the dishes, with light step the Girl
came to the door. She took one long look and understood. She turned
and swiftly went back to the cabin, but her shoulders were shaking.
Presently the Harvester came in and explained that after finishing in
the dry-house he had gone to do the feeding. Then he suggested that
before it grew dark they should go through the rooms and see how they
appeared, and gather the flowers the Girl wanted. So together they
decided everything was clean, comfortable, and harmonized.

Then they went to the hillside sloping to the lake. For the dining-room,
the Girl wanted yellow water lilies, so the Harvester brought his old
boat and gathered enough to fill the green bowl. For the living-room,
she used wild ragged robins in the blue bowl, and on one end of the
mantel set a pitcher of saffron and on the other arrowhead lilies. For
her room, she selected big, blushy mallows that grew all along Singing
Water and around the lake.

"Isn't that slightly peculiar?" questioned the Harvester.

"Take a peep," said the Girl, opening her door.

She had spread the pink coverlet on her couch, and when she set the big
pink bowl filled with mallows on the table the effect was exquisite.

"I think perhaps that's a little Frenchy," she said, "and you may have
to be educated to it; but salmon pink and buttercup yellow are colours I
love in combination."

She closed the door and went to find something to eat, and then to
the swing, where she liked to rest, look, and listen. The Harvester
suggested reading to her, but she shook her head.

"Wait until winter," she said, "when the days are longer and cold, and
the snow buries everything, and then read. Now tell me about my hedge
and the things you have planted in it."

The Harvester went out and collected a bunch of twigs. He handed her a
big, evenly proportioned leaf of ovate shape, and explained: "This is
burning bush, so called because it has pink berries that hang from long,
graceful stems all winter, and when fully open they expose a flame-red
seed pod. It was for this colour on gray and white days that I planted
it. In the woods I grow it in thickets. The root bark brings twenty
cents a pound, at the very least. It is good fever medicine."

"Is it poison?"

"No. I didn't set anything acutely poisonous