fe, swung down the rocky path at a good gait, now and then
swaying his head from side to side to nip the tender shoots of freshly
leaving laurel. She sang:

"Woodpecker pecked as a woodpecker will,
Jim thought 'twas a knock on the door of the still,
He grabbed up his gun, and he went for to see,
The woodpecker laughed as he said: 'Jest me!'"

She laughed, now, not at the song, which was purely automatic, but in
sheer joy of living on that wonderful June day in those marvellous
Kentucky mountains. Their loneliness did not depress her; indeed, to
her, they were not lonely, but peopled by a host of lifelong friends who
had greeted her at birth, and would, she had every reason to suppose,
speed her when her end came. Their majesty did not overwhelm her,
although she felt it keenly, and respected it and loved it with a
certain dear, familiar awe. And everywhere about her was the Spring.
Laurel blossomed at the trail's sides, filling the whole air with
fragrance; the tardier blueberry bushes crowding low about it had begun
to show the light green of their bursting buds; young ferns were pushing
through the coverlet of last autumn's leaves which had kept them snug
against the winter's cold, and were beginning to uncurl their delicate
and wondrous spirals; maple and beech were showing their new leaves. The
air was full of bird-notes--the plaintively pleading or exultantly
triumphant cries of the mating season's joy and passion. Filmy clouds,
like scattered, snowy ostrich plumes, floated, far, far up above her on
a sea of richest blue; a fainter blue of springtime haze dimmed the
depths of the great valley which a wide pass gave her vision of off to
the left--and she was rather glad of this, for the haze, while,
certainly, it hid from her much beauty, also hid the ugly scars which
man was making there on nature's face, the cuts and gashes with which
the builders of the new railway were marring the rich pasture lands.

She turned from this to pleasanter and wilder prospects, close at hand,
as her path narrowed, and began to sing again in sheer joyousness of
spirit.

"Mr. Woodpecker laughed as a woodpecker will,
As Jim stood lookin' out of the door of the still,
'Mr. Jim,' he remarked, 'I have come for to ax
_Ef_ you'd give me a worm for my revenue tax'!"

The placid ox, plodding slowly down the trail, did not swerve when the
bushes parted suddenly at one side, as she finished this verse of her
song, but Mad