dren for carelessly stripping the
lilacs.

Fanny Foster is as wonderful in her way as Ella's garden, though not so
beautiful at first sight. Of course Green Valley loves Fanny Foster.
Green Valley has reason to. Fanny did Green Valley folks a great service
one still spring morning. But strangers just naturally misunderstand
Fanny. They see only a tall, sharp-edged wisp of a woman with a mass of
faded gold hair carelessly pinned up and two wide-open brown eyes fairly
aching with curiosity. You have to know Fanny a long time before the
poignant wistfulness of her clutches at your heart, before you can know
the singular sweetness of her nature. And even when you come to love her
you keep wishing that her collars were pinned on straight and that her
skirts were hung evenly at the bottom. There are those who remember the
time when Fanny was a beautiful girl, happy-go-lucky but always
kind-hearted. Now she is famous for her marvelous instinct for news
gathering and her great talent in weaving the odds and ends of
commonplace daily living into an interesting, gossipy yarn. Green Valley
without Fanny Foster would not be Green Valley, for she is a town
institution.

However, before going any further into Green Valley's special characters
and institutions it would be well to get a general feel of the town into
one's mind. For it is only when you know how cozily Green Valley sets in
its hollows, how quaintly its old tree-shaded roads dip and wander about
over little sunny hills and through still, deep woods that you can guess
the charm of it, can believe in the joyousness of it. For Green Valley
is a joyous, sweetly human old town to those who love and understand it.

Take an early spring day when the winter's wreck and rust and deadness
seem to be everywhere. Yet here in the Green Valley roads and streets
little warm winds are straying, looking for tulip beds and spring
borders. The sunshine that elsewhere looks thin and pale drops warmly
here into back yards and ripples ever so brightly up and down Rabbit's
Hill, where the hedges are turning green and David Allan is plowing.

The willows back of Dell Parsons' house are budding and all aquiver with
the wildly glad, full-throated warblings of robins, bluebirds, red-winged
blackbirds and bobolinks. While somewhere from the swaying tops of last
year's reeds, up from the grassy slopes of Churchill's meadow, comes the
sweet, clear call of meadow larks.

In the ditch