here into back yards and ripples ever so brightly up and down Rabbit's
Hill, where the hedges are turning green and David Allan is plowing.

The willows back of Dell Parsons' house are budding and all aquiver with
the wildly glad, full-throated warblings of robins, bluebirds, red-winged
blackbirds and bobolinks. While somewhere from the swaying tops of last
year's reeds, up from the grassy slopes of Churchill's meadow, comes the
sweet, clear call of meadow larks.

In the ditches the cushioning moss is green and through the brown tangled
weeds along Silver Creek the new grass is peeping. The sunny clearing
back of Petersen's woods will be full of mushrooms as the days deepen.
And already there are big golden dandelions in Widow Green's orchard.

In these still, warm noons you can hear through the waiting, echoing air
the laughing shouts of playing children and the low-dropping honk of the
wild geese that in a scarcely quivering line are sailing northward across
the reedy lowlands which the gentle spring rains will turn into soft,
violet, misty marshes.

The last bit of frost has thawed out of the old Glen Road and in the
young sunshine it seems to laugh goldenly as it climbs up, up to Jim
Gray's squatty, weathered little farmhouse. The eastern windows of this
little silver-gray house are gay with blossoming house plants and across
the back dooryard, flapping gently in the spring breeze, is a line of
gayly colored bed quilts. For Martha Gray has begun her house-cleaning.

The woodsy part of Grove Street, the part that was opened up only five
years ago and is called Lovers' Lane because it curves and winds
mysteriously through a lovely bit of woodland, is already shimmering with