Billy's house was one of the most picturesque of the many pretty homes
in Green Valley. It had been a ramshackle, tumbled-down old cabin lost
in a tangle of bushes and hidden from the road by a shabby, unsightly
row of old willows. Billy was going to rent it for temporary barn
purposes but his wife, who had a nimble and a prophetic eye, made him
buy it. Then, under her supervision Billy enlarged and remodeled it
and Billy's wife waved some sort of a fairy wand over it, for it became
over night a lovely, story-book home. When everything was ready she
had the unsightly willows cut, revealing a gently rising stretch of
mossy sward ending in a cluster of old trees from which the cozy house
peeped roguishly, tantalizingly. Two old walnuts guarded the little
footpath to the door and two huge lilac bushes screened the porch from
the too curious gaze of travelers on the road below. Indeed, so
altogether taking and fascinating a bit of property did it become after
its transformation that it was said that two of Green Valley's real
estate men never went down that road without doing sums in their heads
and calling themselves names for overlooking such a bargain. It takes
constructive imagination to be successful in real estate.

And now around this cozy home spot Billy wandered deliriously,
aimlessly. It was the tolling of the church bell and the smell of the
lilacs that recalled to him the significance of the day.

"Why, he was born on Lilac Sunday and he's red-headed just like Her.
Gosh--I must a bin born lucky!"

Billy looked once more all about his story-book home and then his eyes
strayed away to Petersen's Woods, fairy green and already full of deep
shadowed aisles, full of fretted beauty and solemnity. Beyond them lay
the creek, a pool of silver draped in misty morning veils.