It was Grandma and Grandpa Keeler's custom at the first approach of spring to detach themselves from Madeline's household, and to form a separate and complete establishment of their own in the sunny kitchen, away out at the end of the Ark. I was still, nominally, Madeline's boarder, and sat at the table with her and the little Keelers; but the impulses of my heart were ever guiding my feet to that other dear resort, where doors and hearts seemed always open to receive me, and an inexpressible warmth and light and comfort pervaded the atmosphere. It was early in March, when, returning from school one day at the noontide intermission, I found Grandma standing without the Ark, singularly occupied. The sun was shining on her uncovered head, and the tranquil glow on her face was clearly the exponent of no fictitious happiness. In her apron she had a quantity of empty egg-shells, so carefully drained of their contents as to present an almost perfect external appearance, and these she was arranging on the twigs of a large bush that grew just outside the window. I was glad, afterwards, that I intruded then no skeptical questions as to her purpose, for, as I stood and looked at her, her action gradually lost for me the tinge of eccentricity, with which it had at first seemed imbued. I realized that there was something grander than reason, more exalted than philosophy. "I suppose you've heerd about egg-plants, teacher;" said she, at length, turning to me, while the sun in her face broke up into scintillant beams that penetrated my being, and quickened my very soul. "This 'ere old bush ain't bore nothin' for years, and it looked so bare and sorrerful, somehow, standin' out here all alone, and everything else a kinder wakin' up in the spring, I thought I'd try to sorter liven it up a little;" and she resumed her placid occupation. "Blessed Grandma," I could only murmur, as I turned to enter the Ark; "inspired, delightful soul!" It was in March that the Wallencamp sun-bonnets came forth, all in a single day, a curious and startling pageant. The Modoc, who had gone bareheaded through the winter, assumed hers as a turban of impressive altitude, while the diminutive Carietta and the infant Sophronia appeared but as vagrant telescopes on insufficient pegs. In March the "pipers" lifted up their homesick notes at nightfall, in the meadows. On the last day of that month, I found arbutus in bloom under the leaves in the cedar woods. Scarcely had the first faint signs of herbage appeared on the earth ere the Wallencamp cows and horses were given over exclusively to the guardianship of nature, and to wander whithersoever they would, for the Wallencamp fences had ceased to present themselves as obstacles in the way. Indeed, some portions of them had been utterly obliterated, and this was easily traced to a habit prevalent among the Wallencampers of resorting to them for fuel when, on some winter night, other resources were found to be low.