So spake Sir Christopher, who, old swashbuckler though he was, possessed a real love of nature and a real appreciation of beauty in whatever form it revealed itself, as he stood upright with folded arms and looked about him, while Betty, her little fingers grimed with soil and scratched with briers, delved amid the thickset ground pine to find the flowers hiding there. It was one of those early April days which redeem the character of the froward month, and make one almost love its capricious yet prophetic gleams better than the assured joys of June. A high wind from the west drove before it great white cumuli, glittering like silver in the strong sunlight, and careering across the sky and dropping down behind Manomet as if in an illimitable game of hide-and-seek and catch-who-catch-can. The waves, uneasy at beholding liberty they might not have, and games they might not join, leaped as high as they could toward that azure playground, laughed back to the sun who laughed with them, or, breaking hoarsely upon the shore, sent up their voices of sturdy discontent. The trees, moved by such gigantic melody to bear their part in the grand antiphony, clashed their bare branches in a rhythm too vast for the human ear to comprehend, while the evergreens murmured and sobbed and whispered together, lamenting that they had not even dried leaves to send whirling down that wondrous dance. The brook, its icy winter shroud still clinging to the banks, rose up to assert that life defies the shroud, and that there is a power of spring which shall vanquish death again and again forever; and as the brown waters went tumbling and leaping down toward the ocean which the icy shroud can never compass, their sweet voices joined in the universal song like children in the choir. On sheltered slopes and sunny hillsides the grass was springing green, and though no flowers disputed the epigæa’s precedence, the violets and anemones, the snowdrops and the Solomon’s seal, stood with finger on lip and foot on the threshold, waiting for courage to cross it. Coming up the brookside in her blue skirt and mantle, a white handkerchief tied over her hair, which in spite of it escaped in a hundred little dancing tendrils, Prissie seemed a part of the great sweeping harmony of sky and wind and sea and shore, and the knight, as with his extended right arm he swept in the lines of a magnificent imaginary landscape, felt, as his eyes first lighted upon that figure, more as if it were the fitting centre and _motif_ of his piece than a real personage. “A red cloak would be better,” muttered he. “And yet no,--no,--the cold purity of blue is more harmonious, and marries well with sky and sea, but-- Aha, Betty, there’s your friend Mistress Carpenter!” “Is it? Oh, yes! I’ll call her.” “Nay, we’ll stroll that way and see the brook near at hand, and you may search for gooseberries while I exchange a word with pretty Prissie.”