the spring
had enacted itself upon the earth. I had not often seen this wonderful
and magical renewal which has delighted man through all the ages, and to
which only the very aged seem indifferent; it ravished me and I
allowed my joy to take possession of me almost to the point of
intoxication.--Oh! that pure, warm, soft air; the glorious sunlight and
the tender, fresh green of the young plants and the budding trees
that already cast a little shade. And in myself there was an unwonted
strength that bespoke recovery, and I rejoiced mightily when I breathed
in the sweet air and felt the flood of new life.

My brother was a tall fellow of twenty-one who had the freedom of the
house and grounds in which to work out any of his fancies. During my
convalescence I entertained myself greatly speculating about something
he was busy with in the garden, which something I was dying of
impatience to see. At the end of the yard, in a lovely nook under an
old plum tree, my brother was making a tiny lake; he had dug it out and
cemented it like a cistern, and from the country round about he procured
stones and quantities of moss with which to make the banks about the
lake romantic looking; he also constructed rocky elevations and grottoes
out of stones and mosses.

And this work was finished the day that I went out for the first time;
they had even put little gold fish into the water, and they turned on
the tiny fountain and it played in my honor.

I approached it with ecstasy, and I found that it greatly surpassed in
beauty anything that my imagination had been able to conjure up. And
when my brother told me it was mine, I felt a joy so intense that it
seemed to me it must last forever. Oh! what unexpected joy to possess it
for my very own! And what happiness to know that I could enjoy it every
single day during the warm and beautiful months that were to come. And
the thought of being able to live out of doors again, the prospect of
playing in every nook of that lovely garden, as I had done the previous
summer, was rapture to me.

I remained at the edge of the pond a long time, looking at it and
admiring it unceasingly, and I breathed in the sweet, mild spring air,
and warmed myself in the radiant sunlight so long denied to me. The old
plum tree above my head, planted so long ago by one of my ancestors, and
now almost at the end of its usefulness, spread its lacy curtain of new
leaves to the tender blue of the sky, and the tiny foun