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The first intimation I had of coming habitation was a pig, a lean, black, razor-back pig which grunted at my intrusion beneath his oak tree and went racing off at a great pace, almost gracefully, I might say, for even a pig which wanders on a mountainside develops something of the agility of a wild creature. Not far beyond I came quite suddenly upon such a picture as you may see nowhere in the world but in our southern highlands, in the Spring. Aware of my coming, if I was not aware of their proximity, six tow-headed, bare-footed, single-garmented children, the eldest a girl not over ten, the youngest an infant just able to stand, were ranged in solemn row, like a flight of steps, upon the top of a large flat stone at the edge of a little clearing, in perfect silence watching me approach, the violets and bloodroot blossoms they had been gathering dangling in loose bunches from their hands. Behind them, just across the brook which ran, like a road, in front of the gate, stood a weathered-gray cabin, of rough boards, with a central doorway and windows without sashes. At one end was an outside chimney of field-stone, laid, it seemed, with clay. Surrounding this cabin was a rough picket fence, again of untrimmed boards, with a gate opening on the brook and stepping stones across to the path. In the little compound thus enclosed, and almost overtopping the cabin, were half a dozen peach and plum trees, veritable geyser jets of pink and white bloom. Behind, in a small clearing, was the stubble of last year’s corn. Squalid and poor and mean enough a dwelling, a shiftless clearing, a dirty family of children–yes. But under its geyser jets of blossom that little gray cabin was the essence of the picturesque, with the forest wall rising behind it, and behind that the great headwall of the cove. It was weathered and old and primitive and lovely; and the six little shy ragamuffins on the stone, still staring at me with the eyes of timid animals, were–well, they were six little shy ragamuffins, and that is nice enough!

“Hello,” said I, “I see you’ve got the baby out to gather wild flowers, too.”

The eldest girl found speech, after an effort. “That ain’t the baby,” she said, with a show of scorn for my ignorance. “The baby’s in the house with maw.”

My respect for the capacity of that little cabin was still further increased by this revelation. I asked the eldest girl some questions about the way, finding her directions for spotting a trail in this forest maze remarkably lucid, and went again on my wanderings, my last backward glimpse of the mouse-gray cabin under its pink and white geysers of blossom still showing the six little tow-headed, barefooted youngsters standing like six little patiences on a pedestal, staring after me. But when I had disappeared down the trail I heard from far off, mingling with the murmur of the brook, the shrill sound of childish glee, as they resumed their search for wild flowers. Then it was that Spring smiled, and gave my fingers a little squeeze!

So I wandered on, with Spring for company, all that blissful day, through forests of oak and chestnut where the Judas trees danced, past dogwood thickets and over beds of violets, into unexpected little clearings where always the same gray cabin of rough, weathered boards sat under its geyser jets of pink and white, while shy, pretty children peeped like startled rabbits from the dim doorway and the pig ran off through the woods (when he did not follow me), and finally up the steep slope at the head of a cove again, into the region of the earliest bloodroots, and so to the final shin up the last precipitous wall to the plateau above. As I reached the summit and looked back, I saw the cove was green, and the veil I had gazed through that morning was hazier now; Spring had climbed with me back up the slope and even here on the two-thousand foot rim the trees were bursting into leaf. There was a carpet of brilliant red stonecrop on the rock at my feet. As I came once more to the brook in Thumping Dick I saw a bloodroot on the bank, with the dead leaf it had that day pushed up still clinging to it. Yes–and here was a tiny bed of violets, in a warm, sheltered glade, opening to the sun. I gathered them all, and redecorated my hat. Then I bathed my hot face in the brook and lay listening to a thrasher for a while, as the long shadows of afternoon crept like lean, ghostly fingers through the forest and between me and the sky I could see the lacework of the budding twigs, with here and there a tree that actually showed leaf. No one passed me on the trail. The thrasher and I had the woods all to ourselves, except, of course, for Spring, who sat beside me singing mezza voce, to herself, a song curiously like the ripple of a brook.

At last I rose and followed the dim trail back toward the college, entering the campus as the evening lights were coming on in the dormitory windows, and somewhere a group of boys were singing, not lustily but with the plaintive quality that sometimes steals into the voices of the young and happy at the twilight hour. I tossed my hat on a table, and saw my withered violets falling dejectedly over the band. But I did not care. Back below Thumping Dick was a cove full on the march, coming up the slope, the blue battalions of the Spring. Outside, in the smoky, warm dusk, a thrasher still sang. Spring had left me, for she had far to go, but all the way north I should see the signs where her feet had trod, and when at last I reached once more my northern mountain home, I should find her waiting with a smile, perhaps with just a trillium in her hand to offer me, before she sped on again toward Labrador. But, I thought, I could never know her quite so well again as I had this day; she would not loiter with me quite so familiarly, with her dear, friendly squeeze of my fingers as the childish voices drifted with the brook song down the cove. I had kept tryst with Spring at Thumping Dick, for once the favored of all her myriad lovers.