As the train moved out he sank comfortably back into his seat, and with his chin on his hand he took up his accustomed nightly gaze on the outer landscape. His thoughts ran back to the morning. He saw the room where he had gone to wake his children. It was a large, square room, with colored nursery pictures on the walls and a collection of battered toys in the corner. The place was fresh and cool with the sparkling air of early May, and through the open windows he had seen the lawn thick spread with cobwebs. And in each of the three small beds a pretty child of his lay stretched in a childish attitude of sleep. Very tender they looked, very lovable, in their naive curlings-up, a young, shapely arm flung out in the restlessness of approaching day, lips and nostrils just stirred by the tiny motion of their breathing, and an unbelievable, blossomy hand spread in fairy gesture across a pillow. As he walked through the room, he heard the boy John murmur in his waking dreams. Alicia sat up suddenly, as thin and straight as a new reed in her prim nightgown. Her eyelashes were black and her eyes were heather-purple. 'Father!' she had cried, 'I know what day it is!' And in a moment three small whirlwinds stood up on the floor, dropped their nightgowns, and began to fling their arms and legs into their morning apparel, and there was a great deal of loud conversation full of the presage of festivity. Their father had forgotten that he had a birthday until his wife and children had recovered it from obscurity and made it a day of days. As he left the house he had looked at Maggie, his fragile, high-hearted wife, and urged her not to get tired with the nonsense. She had looked back at him with mock haughtiness and warned him not to be late to supper, or make light of feast days. He did not notice her words; he was curiously unable to grow accustomed to her face. The more he saw it, the more unbelievably beautiful, the more eloquent in delicate and gentle meanings, it became to him. She looked into his eyes quickly, with a question for his sudden absent-mindedness. 'Because your face is so heavenly,' he answered reverently. As the train moved on, he saw that a fresh, green haze had begun to veil and adorn the landscape which through the cold months had been so gaunt and ugly to his daily observation. The hint of fever was in the air--the slight madness that accompanies the pangs of seasonal change. Love glowed in his heart and touched all the veins of his body with its winelike warmth, its inimitable winelike bouquet. 'Life is sweet! Life is sweet!' his body said, echoing and reechoing through all the channels of his being. And as the train carried him on through the fields and woods outside the city, something almost like the fervor of genius took hold of him, plucking at his heart for words, crying to him out of the silent fields and woods for words, words!