flight to the rice-fields
of Carolina; their Mississippi Valley pilgrimage when the acorns and
beech-mast were falling ripe.

What a rich, full morning that was. Everything seemed to turn up for
them. As they walked over a piney hill, two large birds sprang from
the ground and whirred through the trees.

"Ruffed Grouse or 'patridge', as the farmers call them. There's a pair
lives nigh aboots here. They come on this bank for the Wintergreen
berries."

And Yan was quick to pull and taste them. He filled his pockets with
the aromatic plant--berries and all--and chewed it as he went. While
they walked, a faint, far drum-thump fell on their ears. "What's
that?" he exclaimed, ever on the alert. The stranger listened and
said:

"That's the bird ye ha' just seen; that's the Cock Partridge drumming
for his mate."

The Pewee of his early memories became the Phoebe of books. That day
his brookside singer became the Song-sparrow; the brown triller, the
Veery Thrush. The Trilliums, white and red, the Dogtooth Violet, the
Spring-beauty, the Trailing Arbutus--all for the first time got
names and became real friends, instead of elusive and beautiful, but
depressing mysteries.

The stranger warmed, too, and his rugged features glowed; he saw in
Yan one minded like himself, tormented with the knowledge-hunger, as
in youth he himself had been; and now it was a priceless privilege to
save the boy some of what he had suffered. His gratitude to Yan grew
fervid, and Yan--he took in every word; nothing that he heard was
forgotten. He was in a dream, for he had found at last the greatest
thing on earth--sympathy--broad, intelligent, comprehensive sympathy.

That spring morning was ever after like a new epoch in Yan's mind--not
his memory, that was a thing of the past--but in his mind, his living
present.

And the strongest, realest thing in it all was, not the rugged
stranger with his kind ways, not the new birds and plants, but the
smell of the Wintergreen.

Smell's appeal to the memory is far better, stronger, more real than
that of any other sense. The Indians know this; many of them, in time,
find out the smell that conjures up their happiest hours, and keep it
by them in the medicine bag. It is very real and dear to them--that
handful of Pine needles, that lump of Rat-musk, or that piece of
Spruce gum. It adds the crown of happy memory to their reveries.

And yet this belief is one of the first attacked by silly White-men,
w