The mottled goosebone of the Allentown prophet is no more
meteorologically accurate than our subconscience. And this is how it
works.

Once a year, about the approach of the vernal equinox or the seedsman's
catalogue, we wake up at 6 o'clock in the morning. This is an immediate
warning and apprisement that something is adrift. Three hundred and
sixty-four days in the year we wake, placidly enough, at seven-ten, ten
minutes after the alarm clock has jangled. But on this particular day,
whether it be the end of February or the middle of March, we wake with
the old recognizable nostalgia. It is the last polyp or vestige of our
anthropomorphic and primal self, trailing its pathetic little wisp of
glory for the one day of the whole calendar. All the rest of the year we
are the plodding percheron of commerce, patiently tugging our wain; but
on that morning there wambles back, for the nonce, the pang of Eden. We
wake at 6 o'clock; it is a blue and golden morning and we feel it
imperative to get outdoors as quickly as possible. Not for an instant do
we feel the customary respectable and sanctioned desire to kiss the
sheets yet an hour or so. The traipsing, trolloping humor of spring is
in our veins; we feel that we must be about felling an aurochs or a
narwhal for breakfast. We leap into our clothes and hurry downstairs and
out of the front door and skirmish round the house to see and smell and
feel.

It is spring. It is unmistakably spring, because the pewit bushes are
budding and on yonder aspen we can hear a forsythia bursting into song.
It is spring, when the feet of the floorwalker pain him and smoking-car
windows have to be pried open with chisels. We skip lightheartedly round
the house to see if those bobolink bulbs we planted are showing any
signs yet, and discover the whisk brush that fell out of the window last