Louisa was the source of income; conscientious, infernally
disagreeable Louisa!

Would not the rumor of his changed habit of life reach her by some means
in her place of hiding, sooner or later? Would she not yearn for a
sight of Jack? Would she not finally give him a chance to ask
forgiveness, or had she lost every trace of affection for him, as her
letter seemed to imply? He walked the garden paths, with these and other
unanswerable questions, and when he went to his lonely room at night, he
held the lamp up to a bit of poetry that he had cut from a magazine and
pinned to the looking-glass. If John Hathaway could be brought to the
reading of poetry, he might even glance at the Bible in course of time,
Louisa would have said. It was in May that Susanna had gone, and the
first line of verse held his attention.

"May comes, day comes,
One who was away comes;
All the earth is glad again,
Kind and fair to me.

"May comes, day comes,
One who was away comes;
Set her place at hearth and board
As it used to be.

"May comes, day comes,
One who was away comes;
Higher are the hills of home,
Bluer is the sea."

The Hathaway house was in the suburbs, on a rise of ground, and as John
turned to the window he saw the full moon hanging yellow in the sky. It
shone on the verdant slopes and low wooded hills that surrounded the
town, and cast a glittering pathway on the ocean that bathed the beaches
of the near-by shore.

"How long shall I have to wait," he wondered, "before my hills of home
look higher, and my sea bluer, because Susanna has come back to 'hearth
and board'!"

V

THE LITTLE QUAIL BIRD

[Illustration]

Susanna had helped at various household tasks ever since her arrival at
the Settlement, for there was no room for drones in the Shaker hive; but
after a few weeks in the kitchen with Martha, the herb-garden had been
assigned to her as her particular province, the Sisters thinking her
better fitted for it than for the preserving and pickling of fruit, or
the basket-weaving that needed special apprenticeship.

The Shakers were the first people to raise, put up, and sell garden
seeds in our present-day fashion, and it was they, too, who began the
preparation of botanical medicines, raising, gathering, drying, and
preparing herbs and roots for market; and this industry, driven from the
field by modern machinery, was still a valuable source of income in
S