ispered. "It's a shame for the starling to call
us. There's no one left in the world that one can trust."

Then the swallow came:

"Tsee! Tsee!"he whistled and darted through the air on his long, pointed
wings.

[Illustration]

"Out with you, you silly flowers! Can't you see that Dame Spring has
come?"

But the anemones had become careful. They just pushed their green wraps
a little to one side and peeped out:

"One swallow does not make a summer," they said. "Where is your wife?
You have only come to see if it's possible to live here and now you're
trying to take us in. But we are not so stupid as all that. We know
that, once we catch cold, we're done for."

"You're a pack of poltroons," said the swallow and sat down on the
weathercock on the ranger's roof and looked out over the landscape.

But the anemones stood and waited and were very cold. One or two of
them, who could not control their impatience, cast off their wraps in
the sun. The cold at night killed them; and the story of their pitiful
death went from flower to flower and aroused great consternation.

2

Then Dame Spring came, one delightfully mild and still night.

No one knows what she looks like, for no one has ever seen her. But all
long for her and thank her and bless her. She goes through the wood and
touches the flowers and the trees and they bud at once. She goes through
the stables and unfastens the cattle and lets them out into the fields.
She goes straight into men's hearts and gladdens them. She makes it
difficult for the best-behaved boy to sit still on his bench at school
and occasions a terrible lot of mistakes in the exercise-books.

[Illustration]

But she does not do this all at once. She attends to her business night
after night and comes direct to those who long for her most.

So it happened that, on the very night when she arrived, she went
straight to the anemones, who stood in their green wraps and could no
longer curb their impatience.

And one, two, three! There they stood in newly-ironed white frocks and
looked so fresh and pretty that the starlings sang their finest songs
for sheer joy at the sight of them.

"Oh, how lovely it is here!" said the anemones. "How warm the sun is!
And how the birds are singing! It is a thousand times better than last
year."

But they say this every year, so it doesn't count.

Now there were many others who went quite off their heads when they saw
that the anemones were out. Th