leep--not for haggling over the price of sugar and
beans.

"I don't like it," he would say sometimes to his wife; "I don't like
it, Sarah. This doling out a peck of potatoes and two quarts of
apples--why, Sarah, just think of the bushels and barrels I 've grown
myself! It's so small, Sarah, so small!"

"Of course it is now," comforted Sarah, "but only think what 't will be
later on--only think."

December, January, February, and March passed; and the first of April
brought a letter from the lessee of the farm asking if he was to have
the place through the summer.

"Of course he can have it," declared Sarah. "Just as if we wanted it
again!"

"Yes, yes, of course," murmured Caleb. "I--I'll write later on. He
said if he heard by the middle of the month, 't would do."

It was an early, and a wonderfully beautiful spring that year. Warm,
moist winds came up from the south and stirred the twigs and branches
into life. The grass grew green on sunny slopes, and the tulips and
crocuses turned the dull brown beds into riotous color and bloom.
Caleb went out of his way each day that he might pass a tiny little
park, and he always stopped there a motionless two minutes--he would
have told you that he was listening to the green things growing. Sarah
grew restless indoors. She even crawled out on to the fire escape and
sat there one day; but she never tried that but once.

Downstairs, on each side of the big front door was a square-yard patch
of puny, straggling grass; and it was these two bits of possibilities
that put a happy thought into Sarah's head. For three days she said
nothing, but she fell into the way of going often in and out of that
door, and always her eyes were hungrily fixed on one or the other of
those squares. On the fourth day she bought a trowel and some flower
seeds and set resolutely to work. She had dug the trowel into the
earth four times, and was delightedly sniffing the odor from the moist
earth when the janitor appeared.

"Did ye lose something, ma'am?" he asked suspiciously.

"Lose something?" laughed the woman. "Of course not! I've found
something, William. I 've found a flower bed. I 'm going to have the
prettiest one ever was."

"Oh, come now," began the man, plainly disturbed, "that ain't going to
do, you know. I'll have to--"

"Oh, I'll tend it," she interrupted eagerly. "You won't even have to
touch it."

The man shook his head.

"'T won't do, ma 'am,--'t won't, re