down at her a moment.

"Your eyes look just as they did when you were a little child," he said.
He lifted her hand and pressed his warm young lips to it.

CHAPTER XXII

He awoke the next morning with a glow in his heart which should not be
new to youth, but was new to him. He remembered feeling something rather
like it years before when he had been a little boy and had wakened on the
morning of his birthday and found his mother kissing him and his bed
strewn with gifts.

He went downstairs and, strolling on to the porch, saw Sheba in the
garden. As he went to join her, he found himself in the midst of familiar
paths and growths.

"Why," he exclaimed, stopping before her, "it is the old garden!"

"Yes," Sheba answered; "Uncle Tom made it like this because he loved the
other one. You and I have played in the same garden. Good-morning,"
laughing.

"Good-morning," he said. "It is a good-morning. I--somehow I have been
thinking that when I woke I felt as I used to do when I was a child and
woke on my birthday."

That morning she showed him her domain. To the imaginative boy she led
with her, she seemed like a strange young princess, to whom all the land
belonged. She loved it so and knew so well all it yielded. She showed him
the cool woods where she always found the first spring flowers, the
chestnut and walnut trees where she and Tom gathered their winter supply
of nuts, the places where the wild grapes grew thickest, and those where
the ground was purple-carpeted with violets.

They wandered on together until they reached a hollow in the road, on one
side of which a pine wood sloped up a hillside, looking dark and cool.

"I come here very often," she said, quite simply. "My mother is here."

Then he saw that a little distance above the road a deserted log cabin
stood, and not far from it two or three pine trees had been cut down so
that the sun could shine on a mound over and about which flowers grew. It
was like a little garden in the midst of the silent wildness.

He followed her to the pretty spot, and she knelt down by it and removed
a leaf or a dead flower here and there. The little mound was a snowy mass
of white blossoms standing thick together, and for a yard or so about the
earth was starred with the same flowers.

"You see," she said, "Uncle Tom and I plant new flowers for every month.
Everything is always white. Sometimes it is all lilies of the valley or
white hyacinths, and then it is w