imself, asking Dorothy to wait in the
arbor, expecting to be gone five minutes. He was delayed at least
twenty. When he returned she was peacefully sleeping on the bench. To
awaken her he held the bunch of flowers to her face.

She smiled, sat up and stretching out her arms moved them up and down
more rapidly than he thought humanly possible; the vibration or arc
described, being one eighth of a complete circle. She bent forward,
placing her lips above first one corolla then another. Her actions were
unmistakable imitations of a humming bird. During the whole time she
kept up an incessant humming or a chirpy little chatter, when John,
almost in tears, taking her by the arm, awoke her.

"Oh! Oh! While you were away I slept and had the funniest dream. Come
with me to the hammock under the oaks in the yard and I will tell it.
Tell me the name of those strangely familiar flowers? Why they are the
very ones I saw in my dream!"

THE DREAM.

"I sat on a bare twig, far from the ground, feeling safer at that giddy
height than nearer earth, preening pinions, polishing beak and uttering
the while a plaintive little chatter.

"There was a whirry buzz from above, a breeze of swift motion, a tremor
of my perch, and beside me sat a gorgeous little knight, dressed even
more brilliantly than I.

"His general body armor was of shining golden green, duller and giving
gradual place to an opaque black underneath. He wore a crown of metallic
violet and gorget of emerald green; his tail feathers were a brassy
sheeny green and upon his breast and near his eyes were a few feathers
of snowy white, as though he had been caught for a second in a snow
storm.

"As he moved in the sunlight those colors shifted and changed until, if
I had not been restrained by modesty, in ecstasy I must have
cried;--'What a gorgeous being you are!' and he, doubtless reading my
thoughts and more than pleased that I liked his appearance, moved yet
closer and whispered words of love to me.

"From our perch we looked out upon the land, the foothill country. It
was loved and kissed by the sun. The scent of fragrant blossoms filled
the air and the fields were dotted with vari-colored flowers. Far above
to the north was a mountain range, the highest peaks of which were
covered with snow, and far below to the south was a lazy tropic river
hemmed to the water's edge by forests of dense shade. There we never
ventured though sometimes when the sun was hottest we fle