Fourth--Maggie Murphy with a new red feather in her old straw hat, happy
and self-conscious, in the Grand Street turnout.

Of course, the rabbits do not count. Nor the Easter eggs, since the
higher criticism has hard-boiled them.

The limited field of its pictorial possibilities proves that Easter, of
all our festival days, is the most vague and shifting in our conception.
It belongs to all religions, although the pagans invented it. Going back
still further to the first spring, we can see Eve choosing with pride a
new green leaf from the tree _ficus carica_.

Now, the object of this critical and learned preamble is to set forth
the theorem that Easter is neither a date, a season, a festival, a
holiday nor an occasion. What it is you shall find out if you follow in
the footsteps of Danny McCree.

Easter Sunday dawned as it should, bright and early, in its place on the
calendar between Saturday and Monday. At 5.24 the sun rose, and at 10.30
Danny followed its example. He went into the kitchen and washed his
face at the sink. His mother was frying bacon. She looked at his hard,
smooth, knowing countenance as he juggled with the round cake of soap,
and thought of his father when she first saw him stopping a hot grounder
between second and third twenty-two years before on a vacant lot in
Harlem, where the La Paloma apartment house now stands. In the front
room of the flat Danny's father sat by an open window smoking his pipe,
with his dishevelled gray hair tossed about by the breeze. He still
clung to his pipe, although his sight had been taken from him two years
before by a precocious blast of giant powder that went off without