whose
good-will Ambition toils, look on with indifference; for they know the
emptiness of human greatness. But while we stop to moralize, the reader
grows a-weary; and even thou, DEIDRICH, who art so constitutionally
polite, compressest thy labial muscles, and thumpest nervously the floor
with thy gold-headed walking stick. What a pity that we cannot talk
nonsense gracefully!

There, now, all this time has the damsel Spring been awaiting our
commands, shivering mayhap in her scanty drapery, while we have been
prating. So it is the world over. The best intentioned forget the claims
of others, listening to the sweet music of their own sweet voices.
DEIDRICH, you ought to be here in the country to see what Hans and Peter
are doing 'at this present.'

Just back of the house, (we are at the old Homestead,) the snow has melted
away, and an impatient crocus is just peeping up to get a look at the warm
sun. The spruce, at whose foot it grows all the winter long, has kindly
extended one of its lower branches over it, to shield it from the frost,
and now straitens it up again to give the poor little plant a glimpse or
two of the warm blue sky and the golden sun. And here, on the southern
side of the house, the windows are thrown up, and the door of the wing
swung open for the first time in four long months. There, Peter, in the
side of the wing where you see the ends of two or three bricks protruding
from a circular hole in the clapboards, is the nest of a pair of wrens
that year after year come back to rear a new family, and chirp and chatter
away the summer, when their labors have ceased. If it were a few weeks
later, you might get acquainted with the comical little occupants, who are
as brisk and busy as if they were not in reality great grand-parents to a
whole republic of wrens. See! on the top of the wood-shed, how proudly the
old rooster struts along the weather-board, enjoying the discomfiture of
his wives, who have been trying for this half-hour from the corn-house
steps to reach the same desirable elevation. And ever and anon he crows to
answer the tumultuous cackle of the plebeian fowl in the barn-yard, with
whom he never mingles, save when a hawk threatens them with common danger;
and then, forgetting all his aristocracy, he seeks the same sheltering
apple-tree or clump of briars in the fence-corner, where the enemy cannot
penetrate. Friend Peter, just buckle on your over-shoes and come with me
through the back gate