orth to the festival of the goddess of grain and harvests; and under
such skies, English poets were wont to sing of skylarks and of golden
daffodils. But in the calendar of the Kentucky housewife there is no
Floralia or Thesmophoria, and no smile or breath of song was on the lips
of the girl who was climbing the back stairs of an old farmhouse, with
a bucket of water in one hand and a cake of soap in the other, to
celebrate the Christian festival of spring cleaning. The steps were
steep and narrow, and every time she set her foot down they creaked
dismally, as if to warn the climber that they might fall at any minute.
She toiled painfully up and set the bucket on the floor. Where should
she begin her work? She went into the nearest bedroom, opened the door
of a closet, and looked disgustedly at the disorder within,--coats,
hats, trousers, disabled suspenders, a pair of shoes caked with mud, an
old whip-handle, an empty blacking box, a fishing-pole and tangled line,
a hammer, and a box of rusty nails. It was not an unfamiliar sight. She
had cleaned the boys' closet and the boys' room every spring for--how
many years? It made her tired to think of it, and she sat down on the
edge of the slovenly bed and stared hopelessly around the low-ceiled,
dingy room. The mouldy wall paper was peeling off, the woodwork was an
ugly brown, dirty, discolored, and worn off in spots; the furniture was
rickety, the bedclothes coarse and soiled; and walls, floors, and
furniture reeked with a musty odor as of old age, decay, and death. All
houses that have sheltered many generations acquire this atmosphere;
nothing but fire can wholly destroy such uncleanness, and some vague
idea of the impossibility of making the old house wholesomely clean
crossed the girl's mind as she sat listlessly on the side of the bed and
stared out of the window.

There are two kinds of homesickness. One is a longing for home that
seizes the wanderer and draws him across continent and ocean back to the
country and the house of his nativity. Men have died of this
homesickness on many a foreign soil. The other kind is a sickness of
home that draws us away from ordered rooms, from sheltering walls and
roofs, to the bare, primitive forest life that was ours ages ago. It was
this homesickness that made Miranda sigh and frown as she looked at that
room, gray and dingy with the accumulated dirt of the winter, and
thought of the task before her. While she sat, scowling and re