nests, and were now busy following the
ploughman, and waxing fat on succulent worms. The sedgy pools and
ditches in the forest were noisy with the hoarse croaking of colonies
of frogs. Lambs skipped in the farmers' meadows, and cropped the grass
that had already lost the brown tinge of winter.

Spring was come, vouched for by the calendar, the place of King Sol in
the blue heavens, and the changing aspect of reawakening nature.

By every token of a healthy youth and a glorious March morning,
Johnnie's thoughts should have been light, fanciful, and centred round
the fair image of Mistress Dorothy Dawe. Alas! they were dark as a
midwinter night, and as gloomy as a funeral oration.

"'She only drove me to despair,
When--she--un-kind--did--prove.'"

Johnnie hummed the last few bars of a popular madrigal in slow and
dirge-like tones. "She" was still wayward and unkind, and "He" was
setting out on the morrow in search of treasure to lay at a maiden's
feet. The young fellow's visions of the Indies were no longer rosy,
but drab as November skies. He was pledged to set his face westward
ho! but the zest was gone out of the enterprise. He leaned over a
gate, and watched the gulls fishing in the river.

Johnnie did not hear a light step coming down the meadow towards him;
no sound disturbed his melancholy reflections. "Jack!" murmured a soft
voice.

The young man started as though an arrow had struck him. His face
flushed hotly, and a gleam of pleasure lighted up its gloom.

"Good morrow, Mistress Dorothy," he said. "I suppose thy father waits
at the house? I will go to him at once."

He turned from the stile; but on his arm there was the flutter of a
hand like to the flutter of a bird's wing, and he stopped. He turned
to look at the river again, and the maiden's eyes followed his. There
was silence whilst a man might have told ten score.

"The wings of the gulls flash like silver in the sunshine," ventured
Dorothy.

"So I have thought."

A pause.

"Thou art leaving us to-morrow."

"That is why I have been watching the gulls for near an hour."

"I don't understand."

"Paignton Rob says that these white gulls are found all the world over.
I shall see them a thousand leagues away--screaming round the ship;
massing in white armies on the New World cliffs; fishing in the rivers.
My last vision of home must have white gulls in it. Away yonder they
will be fairy birds to me, calling up pictures o