the spring when the songs of the birds drove me most clean
crazy. I wanted to run out through the long pasture grass,
wetting my legs with the dew of it, and to climb the rail
fence, and keep on through the timber and up and up over the
divide so as to get a look around. Oh, I had all kinds of
hankerings--to follow up the canyon beds and slosh around from
pool to pool, making friends with the water-dogs and the
speckly trout; to peep on the sly and watch the squirrels and
rabbits and small furry things and see what they was doing and
learn the secrets of their ways. Seemed to me, if I had time, I
could crawl among the flowers, and, if I was good and quiet,
catch them whispering with themselves, telling all kinds of
wise things that mere humans never know.'"

Trefethan paused to see that his glass had been refilled.

"Another time she said: 'I wanted to run nights like a wild
thing, just to run through the moonshine and under the stars,
to run white and naked in the darkness that I knew must feel
like cool velvet, and to run and run and keep on running. One
evening, plumb tuckered out--it had been a dreadful hard hot
day, and the bread wouldn't raise and the churning had gone
wrong, and I was all irritated and jerky--well, that evening I
made mention to dad of this wanting to run of mine. He looked
at me curious-some and a bit scared. And then he gave me two
pills to take. Said to go to bed and get a good sleep and I'd
be all hunky-dory in the morning. So I never mentioned my
hankerings to him, or any one any more.'

"The mountain home broke up--starved out, I imagine--and the