the life and beauty of spring.

Down on Fern Avenue, which is a wide, grassy road and no avenue at all,
Uncle Roger Allan is carefully painting his chicken coops. Roger Allan
is a tall, twinkling, smooth-shaven old man, and he lives in a house as
twinkling and as tidy as himself. He is a bachelor, but years ago he
took little David from the dead arms of an unhappy, wild young stepsister
and has brought him up as his own. People used to know the reasons why
Roger Allan had never married but few remember now. Here he is at any
rate, painting his chicken coops and standing still every now and then to
stare off at Rabbit's Hill where his boy, tall, sturdy David Allan, is
plowing the warm, black fields.

Up in a narrow lane, at the side window of a blind-looking little house,
sits Mrs. Rosenwinkle. She is German and badly paralyzed and she
believes that the earth is flat and that if you walked far enough out
beyond Petersen's pasture you would most certainly fall off. She also
believes that only Lutherans like herself can go to heaven. But to-day,
beside the open window, with a soft, wooing, eiderdown little breeze
caressing her face, she is happy and unworried, her eyes busy with the
tender world and the two chubby grandchildren tumbling gleefully about in
the still lane.

In his little square shoe shop built out from his house Joe Baldwin is
arranging his spring stock in his two modest show windows. Joe is a
widower with two boys, a gentle voice, a gentle, wondering mind, and a
remarkable wart in the very center of his left palm. His shop is a
sunny, cheerful room with plenty of benches and chairs. The little shop
has a soft gray awning for the hot days and a wide-eyed competent stove
for cold ones. Nobody but Grandma Wentworth and such other folks like