the feeling of
growth impresses every sense. The haze-filled April mornings, warming
into the forcing ardor of noon, had stirred into life the activity
latent in root and twig. May's glowing sun, shining through the
scantily covered branches, made dancing motes of heat wave above the
surface of red clay. The aspens fluttered into exquisite greenness. The
sourwood put forth the satin of its tender leaves. All over the
mountain-sides and through the forest thickets the oak-tips blushed
faint pink, a delicate velvet against the stout bristles of the yellow
pines.

Birds flew over, bound for the North, each with his instinctive goal;
some almost at their journey's end, others with many a long ethereal
mile before them. Some of them sojourned for a few days, following the
ploughman as he overturned the mellow earth. Others let this high land
be the end of their wanderings, and settled here to the duty of
love-making and the pleasures of domestic life.

The azalea flamed in yellow and orange and scarlet glory, a note of
savage color on spring's soft palette. The delicate clusters of the
laurel, and, later, of the rhododendron, crowned the stems of the
parent bush, as sometimes a fair girl springs from a rough and ugly
father.

The germ grew strong within its warm seed-prison, and sent inquiring
leaflets into the upper world; and the adventurers never returned, but
sent back demands for food and drink, as colonists to a new land rely
upon the mother-country for sustenance and support.

On the steep mountain-sides, and in the coves that dimple the lower
slopes; on the flat lands of the plateau, and in the meadows along the
French Broad, the slender shafts of the corn-leaves were pushing upward
with what success their position fostered. By mid-June the crop in the
bottom-land was knee-high, while that nourished by the field over which
Sydney had stumbled on the top of Buck Mountain was only half as tall.

Bud Yarebrough and Pink Pressley were hoeing among stalks half-way
between these heights on the upland slopes of the Baron's farm, whose
cultivable land they had hired for the season. Stripped to their
shirts, whose open throats showed each a triangle of sunburned skin,
they worked rapidly down the adjoining furrows, one keeping a hoe's
length behind the other, that their tools might not interfere.
Conversation was more pithy than voluble.

"Damn hot," ejaculated Pink, stopping to hitch up his trousers, and
then to spi