The new dweller in the country longs for the coming of May as the only truly gracious month of the New England spring. In a few seasons, however, he learns to regret April, for when that month has gone, and the curtain fairly rises on the Masque of Spring, while it seems as if the orchestra is but playing the overture, and while yet he is watching the drapery curtain of leafage unfold, the throng on foot and wing pass by, all madly whirling to the pipe of Pan as they follow the voice of the ages that guides them to their breeding haunts, lo and behold! spring promise has merged in the summer of fulfilment. It was Brooke’s first knowledge of the coming of spring in wild nature. Spring in New York means a certain lassitude and enervation—the sun withers and the river winds chill alternately with exasperating inconsistency. The planted tulips put up their decorous heads in the parks at a certain date, much as the women in the streets don their flowery spring head-gear,—both are pleasing to the eye, yet there is nothing spontaneous or unexpected about either; while to come suddenly upon a mat of arbutus or catch the silvery gleam of a mass of bloodroot transfiguring the silence of the woodland, where the leaves of a dozen winters, graduating to leaf mould, muffle the tread, is an event. So every night Brooke longed for the next morning and its surprises, and every morning she was eager for sunset and the night voices. Not that she wished time away,—far from it,—but to her its passing also meant progress, the nearing a certain goal. Sometimes it seemed to her that in a previous existence she had lived the life of the River Kingdom; perhaps it was the heredity moulded beside the Highland torrents that sang to her in the voice of the Moosatuk. On this last day of April, as she stood at the edge of the pasture, with wands of delicate cherry bloom waving softly between her and the river, like heralds ushering one into the presence of a monarch, the words from the song of the migrant bird, “Out of the South,” came to her lips, and she chanted them softly, watching the old horse holding a nose-to-nose conversation with a neighbour in the next field:— “I have sought In far wild groves below the tropic line To leave old memories of this land of mine. I have fought This vague mysterious power that flings me forth Into the north. But all in vain, when flutes of April blow, The immemorial longing lures me, and I go!” Then, abandoning for the time the fight against the lure of a voice beyond her ken and a memory in which sweetness and pain were inextricably blended, she gave herself wholly up to the spell of the present.