came into the girl's face.
"Do not ask me to recite again," she pleaded; "I can not. You _must_ let
me do what I feel is right."

"What is there wrong in reciting Shakspeare?"

"I do not know. But something comes over me at times, and I am almost
swept away. I can not bear to think of the feeling."

"Then don't," said Rast.

"You do not understand me."

"I don't believe you understand yourself; girls seldom do."

"Why?"

"Let me beg you not to fall into the power of that uncomfortable word,
Annet. Walters says women of the world never use it. They never ask a
single question."

"But how can they learn, then?"

"By observation," replied young Pronando, oracularly.

CHAPTER V.

"It was Peboan, the winter!
From his eyes the tears were flowing
As from melting lakes the streamlets,
And his body shrunk and dwindled
As the shouting sun ascended;
And the young man saw before him,
On the hearth-stone of the wigwam,
Where the fire had smoked and smouldered,
Saw the earliest flower of spring-time,
Saw the miskodeed in blossom.
Thus it was that in that Northland
Came the spring with all its splendor,
All its birds and all its blossoms,
All its flowers and leaves and grasses."

--LONGFELLOW. _The Song of Hiawatha._

On this Northern border Spring came late--came late, but in splendor.
She sent forward no couriers, no hints in the forest, no premonitions on
the winds. All at once she was there herself. Not a shy maid, timid,
pallid, hesitating, and turning back, but a full-blooming goddess and
woman. One might almost say that she was not Spring at all, but Summer.
The weeks called spring farther southward showed here but the shrinking
and fading of winter. First the snow crumbled to fine dry grayish
powder; then the ice grew porous and became honeycombed, and it was no
longer safe to cross the Straits; then the first birds came; then the
far-off smoke of a steamer could be seen above the point, and the
village wakened. In the same day the winter went and the summer came.

On the highest point of the island were the remains of an old
earth-work, crowned by a little surveyor's station, like an arbor on
stilts, which was reached by the aid of a ladder. Anne liked to go up
there on the first spring day, climb the ice-coated rounds, and,
standing on the dry old snow that covered the floor, gaze off t