Davy was reading at the window, his curly head buried in a well-worn Shakespeare opened at “Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Lyddy was sitting under her favourite pink apple-tree, a mass of fragrant bloom, more beautiful than Aurora’s morning gown. She was sewing; lining with snowy lawn innumerable pockets in a square basket that she held in her lap. The pockets were small, the needles were fine, the thread was a length of cobweb. Everything about the basket was small except the hopes that she was stitching into it; they were so great that her heart could scarcely hold them. Nature was stirring everywhere. The seeds were springing in the warm earth. The hens were clucking to their downy chicks just out of the egg. The birds were flying hither and thither in the apple-boughs, and there was one little home of straw so hung that Lyddy could look into it and see the patient mother brooding her nestlings. The sight of her bright eyes, alert for every sign of danger, sent a rush of feeling through Lyddy’s veins that made her long to clasp the tiny feathered mother to her own breast. A sweet gravity and consecration of thought possessed her, and the pink blossoms falling into her basket were not more delicate than the rose-coloured dreams that flushed her soul. Anthony put in the last wooden peg, and taking up his violin called, “Davy, boy, come out and tell me what this means!” Davy was used to this; from a wee boy he had been asked to paint the changing landscape of each day, and to put into words his uncle’s music. Lyddy dropped her needle; the birds stopped to listen, and Anthony played. “It is this apple-orchard in May-time,” said Davy; “it is the song of the green things growing, isn’t it?” “What do say, dear?” asked Anthony, turning to his wife. Love and content had made a poet of Lyddy. “I think Davy is right,” she said. “It is a dream of the future, the story of all new and beautiful things growing out of the old. It is full of the sweetness of present joy, but there is promise and hope in it besides. It is as if the Spring was singing softly to herself because she held the baby Summer in her arms.” Davy did not quite understand this, though he thought it pretty; but Lyddy’s husband did, and when the boy went back to his books, he took his wife in his arms and kissed her twice—once for herself, and then once again.