"With the exception of the one day in the month, when you attend the
'Shriners' meeting' in the city," mischievously supplemented Mary, who
knew her Uncle's liking for the Masonic Lodge of which he was a
member, "and," she continued, "I brought you a picture for your
birthday, which we shall celebrate tomorrow. The picture will please
you, I know. It is entitled, 'I Love to Love a Mason, 'Cause a Mason
Never Tells.'"

They passed cultivated farms. Inside many of the rail fences,
inclosing fields of grain or clover, were planted numberless sour
cherry trees, snowy with bloom, the ground underneath white with
fallen petals. The air was sweet with the perfume of the half-opened
buds on the apple trees in the near-by orchards and rose-like pink
blossoms of the "flowering" crab-apple, in the door yards. Swiftly
they drove through cool, green, leafy woods, crossing a wooden bridge
spanning a small stream, so shallow that the stones at the bottom were
plainly to be seen. A loud splash, as the sound of carriage wheels
broke the uninterrupted silence, and a commotion in the water gave
evidence of the sudden disappearance of several green-backed frogs,
sunning themselves on a large, moss-grown rock, projecting above the
water's edge; from shady nooks and crevices peeped clusters of early
white violets; graceful maidenhair ferns, and hardier members of the
fern family, called "Brake," uncurled their graceful, sturdy fronds
from the carpet of green moss and lichen at the base of tree trunks,
growing along the water's edge. Partly hidden by rocks along the bank
of the stream, nestled a few belated cup-shaped anemones or "Wind
Flowers," from which most of the petals had blown, they being one of
the earliest messengers of Spring. Through the undergrowth in the
woods, in passing, could be seen the small buds of the azalea or wild
honeysuckle, "Sheep's Laurel," the deep pink buds on the American