the winter before as a refuge while he was hunting
deer. They had reached a point in the forest where
two paths met, when Margaret's quick ear caught the
sound of a human voice, and she stopped to
listen.

"Quick--" she cried--"get behind these spruces,
or he will see us and stop singing. It's old Mr. Burton.
He is such a dear! He spends his summers
here. I often meet him and he always bows to me
so politely, although he doesn't know me."

A man of sixty--bare-headed, dressed in a gray
suit, with his collar and coat over his arm and hands
filled with wild-flowers, was passing leisurely along,
singing at the top of his voice. Once he stopped, and,
bending over, picked a bunch of mountain-berries
which he tucked into a buttonhole of his flannel shirt,
just before disappearing in a turn of the path.

Oliver looked after him for a moment. He had
caught the look of sweet serenity on the idler's face,
and the air of joyousness that seemed to linger behind
him like a perfume, and it filled him with delight.

"There, Margaret! that's what I call a happy man.
I'll wager you he has never done anything all his life
but that which he loved to do--just lives out here and
throws his heart wide open for every beautiful thing
that can crowd into it. That's the kind of a man I