not, strictly speaking, an Easter tale, nor a love story. It is
merely the truthful account of certain incidents of a love affair
culminating one Easter Day. It may be relied upon. I am familiar with
the facts, and I want to say here that if there be any one who thinks he
could relate similar facts more exactly--I will admit that he might do
the relation in much better form--he is either mistaken or else an
envious person with a bad conscience. I am going to tell that which I
know simply as it occurred.

There is a friend of mine who is somewhat more than ordinarily
well-to-do, who is about thirty years of age, and who lives ordinarily
in the city of Chicago. Furthermore, he is a gentleman of education, not
merely of the school and university, but of the field and wood. He knows
the birds and beasts, and delights in what is wild. Four or five years
ago he purchased a tract of land studded closely with hardwood trees,
chiefly the beech and hard maple, and criss-crossed by swift-flowing
creeks of cold water. This tract of land was not far from the northern
apex of the southern peninsula of the State of Michigan. There were
ruffed grouse in the woods, in the creeks were speckled trout in
abundance, and my friend rioted among them. He had built him a house in
the wilderness; a great house of logs, forty or fifty feet long and
thirty wide, with chambers above, with a great fireplace in it, with
bunks in one great room for men, and with an apartment better furnished
for ladies, should any ever be brought into the wilderness to learn the
ways of nature.

Two years ago my friend gave his first house party, and the duration of
it included Easter Day, and so was, necessarily, in a happy season. It
is pleasant for us in this northern temperate zone that the day, with
all its glorious promises, in a spiritual sense, is as full of promise
also in the physical sense, in that it corresponds with the awakening of
nature and the renewed life of that which so makes humanity. It is a
good thing, too, that since the date of Easter Day is among those known
as "movable," it means the real spring, but a little farther north or
farther south, as the years come and go. So it chanced that the Easter
Day referred to came in the northern peninsula of Lower Michigan just
when the buds upon the trees showed well defined against one of the
bluest skies of all the world, when the teeming currents of the creeks
were lifting the ice, and the waters we