bridal wreath, brushed you gently as you passed the gate. I never see
it deck itself in bridal white, I never inhale its shy, clean scent,
without a tightening of the throat, a misting of the eyes, a melting
of the heart.

Across our garden and across Miss Sally Ruth Dexter's you could see in
Major Appleby Cartwright's yard the peach trees in pink party dresses,
ruffled by the wind. Down the paths marched my mother's daffodils and
hyacinths, with honey-breathing sweet alyssum in between. Robins and
wrens, orioles and mocking-birds, blue jays and jackdaws, thrushes and
blue-birds and cardinals, all were busy house-building; one heard
calls and answers, saw flashes of painted wings, followed by outbursts
of ecstasy. If one should lay one's ear to the ground on such a
morning I think one might hear the heart of the world.

"_Hallelujah! Risen! Risen!_" breathed the glad, green things, pushing
from the warm mother-mold.

"_Living! Living! Loving! Loving!_" flashed and fluted the flying
things, joyously.

We wheeled our man out into this divine freshness of renewed life,
stopping the chair under a glossy, stately magnolia. My mother and
Clélie and Laurence and I bustled about to make him comfortable.
Pitache stood stock still, his tail stuck up like a sternly
admonishing forefinger, a-bossing everything and everybody. We spread
a light shawl over the man's knees, for it is not easy to bear a cruel
physical infirmity, to see oneself marred and crippled, in the growing
spring. He looked about him, snuffed, and wrinkled his forehead; his
eyes had something of the wistful, wondering satisfaction of an