bellious,
a breeze blew in, scattering the sickly odors of the bedroom, and at the
same moment she heard two sounds that seem to belong specially to the
spring of the year, the bleating of some young lambs in a near meadow
and the plaintive lowing of a calf that had been separated from its
mother. Yes, spring was here. How she had longed for it all through the
long, cold, dark days of winter! And now she must spend its sunny hours
in house cleaning! A weariness of all familiar things was upon her; she
hated the old house; she wanted to go,--somewhere, anywhere, and her
soul, like a caged bird, was beating its wings against the bars of
circumstance. She went to the window and leaned out. A branch of a maple
tree growing near the house almost touched her cheek, and she noticed
the lovely shape and color of the young leaves. Farther on was a giant
oak whose orange-green tassels swung gaily in the breeze, and through
the trees she had a glimpse of a green meadow bordered by an osage
orange hedge that looked like a pale green mist in the morning sunshine.
She saw and felt the glory and sweetness of the spring with her physical
senses only, for in her heart there was a "winter of discontent." But
while she leaned from the window, looking at the trees and sky, came one
of those unexplained flashes of consciousness in which the present is
obliterated and we are snatched back to a shadowy past. What was the
incantation that made her feel that she had lived this same moment ages
and ages ago? Was it the voice of the wind and the voice of the bird in
the tree-tops? Was it the shimmer of morning mist and the gold-green
oak tassels against the blue sky? Or was it a blending of all these
sights and sounds? Her gaze wandered farther and farther on till it
reached the horizon line where stretched a fragment of the primitive
wood, bounded by smooth turnpikes and fenced-in fields and meadows.
Serene and majestic these forest remnants stand in every Kentucky
landscape, guardians of the Great Silence, homes for the hunted bird and
beast, and sanctuaries where the stricken soul of man may find a miracle
of healing. A wild, unreasonable longing possessed the homesick girl as
she looked at that line of trees, softly green and faintly veiled, and
thought of what lay in their secret deeps. All her life had been spent
in the country, and yet how many years it had been since she had seen
the woods in spring. _The woods in spring!_ The words were li