hear the call of Spring! You ask me why mere friendship so Outweighs
all else that but comes to go? . . . A truce, a truce to
questioning: "We two are friends," tells everything. I think it vile
to pigeon-hole The pros and cons of a kindred soul. (From Melissa's
Improvement on Certain Older Poets.)

The year Melissa was a high school Junior was fated to be an
unforgettable epoch. In the space of a few short months, all
mysteriously interwoven with their causes and effects, their trials
turning to glory, their disappointments and surcease inexplicable,
came revelations, swift and shifting, or what is really worth while
in life. Oh, Life! And oh, when one is sixteen years old! That is an
age, as many of us can remember, one begins really to know Life--a
complex and absorbing epoch.

The first of these new vistas to unspread itself before Missy's eyes
was nothing less dazzling than Travel. She had never been farther
away from home than Macon City, the local metropolis, or Pleasanton,
where Uncle Charlie and Aunt Isabel lived and which wasn't even as
big as Cherryvale; and neither place was a two-hours' train ride
away. The most picturesque scenery she knew was at Rocky Ford; it
was far from the place where the melons grow, but water, a ford and
rocks were there, and it had always shone in that prairie land and
in Missy's eyes as a haunt of nymphs, water-babies, the Great
Spirit, and Nature's poetics generally--the Great Spirit was
naturally associated with its inevitable legendary Indian love
story. But when Aunt Isabel carelessly suggested that Missy, next
summer, go to Colorado with her, how the local metropolis dwindled;
how little and simple, though pretty, of course, appeared Rocky
Ford.