d her packages from the box. "My dad is beginning to
discourse on you with such signs of intelligence that I am almost led
to believe, from some of his wildest outbursts, that he has had some
personal experience in some way."

"And why not?" asked Linda lightly. "Haven't I often told you that my
father constantly went on fishing and hunting trips, that he was a great
collector of botanical specimens, that he frequently took his friends
with him? You might ask your father if he does not recall me as having
fried fish and made coffee and rendered him camp service when I was a
slip of a thing in the dawn of my teens."

"Well, he didn't just mention it," said Donald, "but I can easily see
how it might have been."

After they had finished one of Katy's inspired lunches, in which a large
part of the inspiration had been mental on Linda's part and executive on
Katy's, they climbed rock faces, skirted wave-beaten promontories, and
stood peering from overhanging cliffs dipping down into the fathomless
green sea, where the water boiled up in turbulent fury. Linda pointed
out the rocks upon which she would sit, if she were a mermaid, to comb
the seaweed from her hair. She could hear the sea bells ringing in those
menacing depths, but Donald's ears were not so finely tuned. At the top
of one of the highest cliffs they climbed, there grew a clump of slender
pale green bushes, towering high above their heads with exquisitely
cut blue-green leaves, lance shaped and slender. Donald looked at the
fascinating growth appraisingly.

"Linda," he said, "do you know that the slimness and the sheerness and
the audacious foothold and the beauty of that thing remind me of you?
It is covered all over with the delicate frostbloom you taught me to see
upon fruit. I find it everywhere but you have never told me what it is."

Linda laughingly reached up and broke a spray of greenish-yellow tubular
flowers, curving out like clustered trumpets spilling melody from their
fluted throats.

"You will see it everywhere. You will find these flowers every month
of the year," she said, "and I am particularly gladsome that this plant
reminds you of me. I love the bluish-green 'bloom' of its sheer foliage.
I love the music these flower trumpets make to me. I love the way it
has traveled, God knows how, all the way from the Argentine and spread
itself over our country wherever it is allowed footing. I am glad that
there is soothing in these dried leaves for