efully. "I have to keep saying it
over and over, so as to really believe it. It seems far too good to be
true that I'm to have Blossom again. And everything is ready. Yes,
I think everything is ready, except a bit of cooking. And won't this
orchard be a surprise to her! I'm just going to bring her out here as
soon as I can, never saying a word. I'll fetch her through the
spruce lane, and when we come to the end of the path I'll step back
casual-like, and let her go out from under the trees alone, never
suspecting. It'll be worth ten times the trouble to see her big, brown
eyes open wide and hear her say, 'Oh, daddy! Why, daddy!'"

He rubbed his hands again and laughed softly to himself. He was a tall,
bent old man, whose hair was snow white, but whose face was fresh and
rosy. His eyes were a boy's eyes, large, blue and merry, and his mouth
had never got over a youthful trick of smiling at any provocation--and,
oft-times, at no provocation at all.

To be sure, White Sands people would not have given you the most
favourable opinion in the world of Old Man Shaw. First and foremost,
they would have told you that he was "shiftless," and had let his bit
of a farm run out while he pottered with flowers and bugs, or rambled
aimlessly about in the woods, or read books along the shore. Perhaps it
was true; but the old farm yielded him a living, and further than that
Old Man Shaw had no ambition. He was as blithe as a pilgrim on a pathway
climbing to the west. He had learned the rare secret that you must take
happiness when you find it--that there is no use in marking the place
and coming back to it at a more convenient season, because it will not
be there then. And it is very easy to be happy if you know, as Old Man
Shaw most thoroughly knew, how to find pleasure in little things. He
enjoyed life, he had always enjoyed life and helped others to enjoy it;
consequently his life was a success, whatever White Sands people might
think of it. What if he had not "improved" his farm? There are some
people to whom life will never be anything more than a kitchen garden;
and there are others to whom it will always be a royal palace with domes
and minarets of rainbow fancy.

The orchard of which he was so proud was as yet little more than the
substance of things hoped for--a flourishing plantation of young trees
which would amount to something later on. Old Man Shaw's house was on
the crest of a bare, sunny hill, with a few staunch old fir