The fresh spring breeze, with its scents of green things growing, was so tantalizing that he paused before the schoolhouse door and thoughtfully wrinkled his brow. Presently his face grew defiant, and he dashed into the schoolroom with the look of a man who had made up his mind to do as he pleased. Finding himself to be the first arrival, he hurried to his desk. Deftly tearing from his copy-book a slip of paper resembling those upon which Mr. Gainsborough wrote Tommy's occasional excuses, the boy dipped his pen and quickly wrote the words,-- "Give Tom a holiday." Now if he had used his own style of penmanship the ruse would have been readily understood by the schoolmaster; but he boldly imitated his father's finely pointed lettering to a nicety, and at the end jotted down the initials, "_J. G._," with two short lines drawn under them, just as his father would have signed the note. Carefully drying his pen, he closed his desk and left the building before any one else arrived. He waited around the corner until almost time for school to begin, then rushed into the schoolroom, now filled with noisy pupils, marched straight up to the master's desk, and presented his forged excuse. Mr. Burroughs read the slip with some surprise. "Of course, Tom," he said, "if your father wishes you to have a holiday, I shall not refuse permission; but I understood that he wished you to remain steadily at school until vacation time." "May I go?" queried the boy hastily, not caring to discuss the question. Mr. Burroughs bowed, but laid the slip of paper in his desk. Tommy, not lingering for further debate, sped from the room; and when he reached the place in the next street, where, under Dame Curran's rosebush, he had hidden his sketch-book, he threw his cap high in air from sheer joy of springtime and freedom. Out from the town he hurried, and soon was tramping through the forest that furnished the banks of the winding river Stour. All day long he revelled in the glory of the woods, and hour after hour he worked with his pencil, striving to put into his book the charming bits of landscape that greeted his eye on every side. One sketch comprised a bend in the river, with grassy meads beyond; another, an old vine-covered bridge, now fallen into disuse; a third merely pictured a broken tree lying across the sunlit path. Occasionally he experienced a sharp twinge somewhere when he remembered that all this pleasure was stolen. "But then," he argued, "what difference does it make? Old Burroughs didn't know, and father will never find it out!"