as any June day. The air was full of the chirps and twitters of
nest-building birds, and of sweet indefinable odors from half-developed
leaf-buds and cherry and pear blossoms. The wisterias overhead were
thickly starred with pointed pearl-colored sacs, growing purpler with each
hour, which would be flowers before long; the hedges were quickening into
life, the long pensile willow-boughs and the honey-locusts hung in a mist
of fine green against the sky, and delicious smells came with every puff
of wind from the bed of white violets under the parlor windows.

Katy and Clover Carr, sitting with their sewing on the door-steps, drew in
with every breath the sense of spring. Who does not know the
delightfulness of that first sitting out of doors after a long winter's
confinement? It seems like flinging the gauntlet down to the powers of
cold. Hope and renovation are in the air. Life has conquered Death, and to
the happy hearts in love with life there is joy in the victory. The two
sisters talked busily as they sewed, but all the time an only
half-conscious rapture informed their senses,--the sympathy of that which
is immortal in human souls with the resurrection of natural things, which
is the sure pledge of immortality.

It was nearly a year since Katy had come back from that too brief journey
to Europe with Mrs. Ashe and Amy, about which some of you have read, and
many things of interest to the Carr family had happened during the
interval. The "Natchitoches" had duly arrived in New York in October, and
presently afterward Burnet was convulsed by the appearance of a tall young
fellow in naval uniform, and the announcement of Katy's engagement to
Lieutenant Worthington.

It was a piece of news which interested everybody in the little town, for
Dr. Carr was a universal friend and favorite. For a time he had been the