and put up signs to warn the flowers. But I want my spring! I want it now!"

"Well," said Jonathan, "there it is. Look!" And he pointed across the brush of the near fence line, where a meadow stretched away, brown with the stubble and matted tangle of last year's grass. Halfway up the springy slope, in a little fold of the hillside, was a shimmer of green—vivid, wonderful.

I forgot the wind. "Oh-h! Think of being a cow now and eating that! Eating spring itself!"

"If you were a cow," said Jonathan, with the usual masculine command of applicable information, "they wouldn't let you eat it."

"They wouldn't! Why not? Does it make them sick?"

"No; crazy."

"Crazy!"

"Just that. Crazy for grass. They won't touch hay any more, and there isn't enough grass for them—and there you are!"

"Did you make that up as you went along, Jonathan?"

"Ask any farmer."

But I think I will not ask a farmer. He might say it was not true, and I like to think it is. I am sorry the cows cannot have their grass, but glad they have the good taste to refuse hay. I should, if I were a cow. Not being one, I do not need an actual patch of green nibble to set me crazy. The smell of the earth after a thaw, a breath of soft air, a wave of delicious sweetness, in April, in March, in February,—when it comes in January I harden my heart and try not to notice,—this is enough to spoil me for the dry fodder of winter. Hay may be good and wholesome, but I have had my taste of spring grass, and it is enough. That or nothing. No more hay for me!

What that strange sweetness of the early spring is I have never fully discovered. The fragrance of flowers is in it,—hepaticas, white violets, arbutus,—yet it is none of these. It comes before any of the flowers are even astir, when the arbutus buds are still tight little green points, when the hepaticas have scarcely pushed open their winter sheaths, while their soft little gray-furred heads are still tucked down snugly, like a bird's head under its wing. Before even the snowdrops at our feet and the maples overhead have thought of blossoming, a soft breath may blow across our path filled with this wondrous fragrance. It is like a dream of May. One might believe the fairies were passing by.

For years I was completely baffled by it. But one March, in the farm orchard, I found out part of the secret. I was planting my sweet peas, when the well-remembered and bewildering fragrance blew across me. I sprang up and ran up the wind, and there, in the midst of the old orchard, I came upon an old apple tree just cut down by the thrift of Jonathan's farmer, who has no silly weakness for old apple trees. The fresh-cut wood was moist with sap, and as I bent over it—ah, there it was! Here were my hepaticas, my arbutus, here in the old apple tree! Such a surprise! I sat down beside it to think it over. I was sorry it was cut down, but glad it had told me its secret before it was made into logs and piled in the woodshed. Blazing in the fireplace it would tell me many things, but it might perhaps not have told me that.

And so I knew part of the secret. But only part. For the same fragrance has blown to me often where there were no orchards and no newly felled apple trees, and I have never, except this once, been able to trace it. If it is the flowing sap in all trees, why are not the spring woods full of it? But they are not full of it; it comes only now and then, with tantalizing capriciousness. Do sound trees exhale it, certain kinds, when the sap starts, or must they have been cut or bruised, if not by the axe, perhaps by the winter winds and the ice storms? I do not know. I only know that when that breath of sweetness comes, it is the very breath of spring itself; it is the call of spring out of winter—spring grass.

When the call of the spring grass comes, there is always one spot that draws me with a special insistence, and every year we have much the same talk about it.

"Jonathan," I say, "let's go to the Yellow Valley."

"Why," says Jonathan, "there will be more new birds up on the ridge."

"I don't care about new birds. The old ones do very well for me."

"And you might find the first hepaticas under Indian Rock."

"I know. We'll go there next."

"And if we went farther up the river, we might see some black duck."

"Very likely; but I don't feel as if I particularly had to see black duck to-day."

"What do you have to see?"

"Nothing special. Just plain spring."

That is the charm of the Yellow Valley. It offers no spectacular inducements, no bargain-counter attractions in the shape of new arrivals among the birds or flowers. One returns from it with no trophies of any kind, nothing to put down in one's notebook, if one keeps a notebook,—from which industry may I be forever preserved! But it is a place to go to and be quiet, which is good for us all, especially in the springtime, when there is so much going on in the world, and especially lately, since "nature study" has driven people into being so unceasingly busy when they are outdoors. Opera-glasses and bird books have their place, no doubt, in the advance of mankind, but they often seem to me nothing but more machinery coming in between us and the real things. Perhaps it was once true that when people went out to view "nature," they did not see enough. Now, I fancy, they see too much; they cannot see the spring for the birds. Their motto is that of Rikki-Tikki, the mongoose, "Run and find out"—an excellent motto for a mongoose,—but for people on a spring ramble!

The unquenchable ardor of the bird lover, so called, fills me with dismay. One enthusiast, writing in a school journal, describes the difficulties of following up the birds: "Often eyes all around one's head, with opera-glasses focused at each pair, would not suffice to keep the restless birds in view." If this is the ideal of the bird lover, it is not mine. I wonder she did not wish for extra pairs of legs to match each set of eyes and opera-glasses, and a divisible body, so that she might scamper off in sections after all these marvels. For myself, one pair of eyes gives me, I find, all the satisfaction and delight I know what to do with, and I cannot help feeling that, if I had more, I should have less. The same writer speaks of the "maddening" warbler notes. Why maddening? Because, forsooth, there are thirty warblers, and one cannot learn all their names. What a pity to be maddened by a little warbler! And about a matter of names, too. After all, the bird, the song, is the thing. And it seems a pity to carry the chasing of bird notes quite so far. They are meant, I feel sure, to be hearkened to in quietness of spirit, to be tasted delicately, as one would a wine. The life of the opera-glassed bird hunter, compared to mine, seems to me like the experience of a tea-taster compared to that of one who sits in cozy and irresponsible enjoyment of the cup her friend hands her.

And so there always comes a time in the spring when I must go to my Yellow Valley. A car ride, a walk on through plain little suburbs, a scramble across fields to a seldom-used railway track, a swing out along the ties, then off across more fields, over a little ridge, and—there! Oh, the soft glory of color! We are at the west end of a miniature valley, full of afternoon sunlight slanting across a level blur of yellows and browns. On one side low brown hills enfold it, on the other runs a swift little river, whose steep farther bank is overhung with hemlocks and laurel in brightening spring green. It is a very tiny valley,—one could almost throw a stone