as so much trouble; she did not like to tell things, she was not a
narrator (one of her mother's phrases); besides it was not interesting.
The girl had a very decided idea about what was and what was not
interesting. But she stopped there, she did not explain her idea to
others; she had the air of not even explaining it to herself.

CHAPTER XVI.

Evert Winthrop was very fond of the pine barrens. They seemed to him to
have a marked character of their own; their green aisles were as unlike
the broad roll of the prairie as they were unlike the usual growth of
the American forest farther north. The pines of the barren stood apart
from each other, they were not even in clusters or pairs. To a
northerner, riding or walking for the first time across the broad
sun-barred spaces under them, the feeling was that this separated growth
was the final outer fringe of some thick forest within, that it would
soon come to an end, widen out, and disappear. But it never did
disappear, the single trees went on rising in the same thin way from the
open ground, they continued to rise for miles; and when the new-comer
had once got rid of the idea that they would soon stop, when he had
become accustomed to the sparse growth, it seemed beautiful in a way of
its own; as slender girls will sometimes seem more exquisite in their
fair meagreness than the maturer women about them with their sumptuous
shoulders and arms.

For one thing, the barrens were the home of all the breezes; winds from
the four quarters of the heavens could sweep through their aisles as
freely as though no trees were there, the foliage was so far above. But
though the winds could blow as they liked, they yet had to take
something of the influences of the place as they passed, and the one
they took oftenest was the aromatic odor, odor sun-warmed through and
through, never chilled by ice or snow. These odors they gathered up and
bore along, so that if it was a breeze from the south, one felt like
sitting still and breathing the soft fragrance forever; and if it was a
north wind, careering down the vistas, the resinous tang it carried gave
a sort of excitement which could find its best expression in the gallop
of a fast horse over the levels. At least so Winthrop thought. And he
had often been guilty of riding for miles at a speed which he would not
have acknowledged at the North; it seemed boyish to ride at that rate
for the mere sake of the glow and the spicy wind in