ugly brown, dirty, discolored, and worn off in spots; the furniture was rickety, the bedclothes coarse and soiled; and walls, floors, and furniture reeked with a musty odor as of old age, decay, and death. All houses that have sheltered many generations acquire this atmosphere; nothing but fire can wholly destroy such uncleanness, and some vague idea of the impossibility of making the old house wholesomely clean crossed the girl's mind as she sat listlessly on the side of the bed and stared out of the window. There are two kinds of homesickness. One is a longing for home that seizes the wanderer and draws him across continent and ocean back to the country and the house of his nativity. Men have died of this homesickness on many a foreign soil. The other kind is a sickness of home that draws us away from ordered rooms, from sheltering walls and roofs, to the bare, primitive forest life that was ours ages ago. It was this homesickness that made Miranda sigh and frown as she looked at that room, gray and dingy with the accumulated dirt of the winter, and thought of the task before her. While she sat, scowling and rebellious, a breeze blew in, scattering the sickly odors of the bedroom, and at the same moment she heard two sounds that seem to belong specially to the spring of the year, the bleating of some young lambs in a near meadow and the plaintive lowing of a calf that had been separated from its mother. Yes, spring was here. How she had longed for it all through the long, cold, dark days of winter! And now she must spend its sunny hours in house cleaning! A weariness of all familiar things was upon her; she hated the old house; she wanted to go,--somewhere, anywhere, and her soul, like a caged bird, was beating its wings against the bars of circumstance. She went to the window and leaned out. A branch of a maple tree growing near the house almost touched her cheek, and she noticed the lovely shape and color of the young leaves. Farther on was a giant oak whose orange-green tassels swung gaily in the breeze, and through the trees she had a glimpse of a green meadow bordered by an osage orange hedge that looked like a pale green mist in the morning sunshine. She saw and felt the glory and sweetness of the spring with her physical senses only, for in her heart there was a "winter of discontent." But while she leaned from the window, looking at the trees and sky, came one of those unexplained flashes of consciousness in which the present is obliterated and we are snatched back to a shadowy past. What was the incantation that made her feel that she had lived this same moment ages and ages ago? Was it the voice of the wind and the voice of the bird in the tree-tops? Was it the shimmer of morning mist and the gold-green oak tassels against the blue sky? Or was it a blending of all these sights and sounds? Her gaze wandered farther and farther on till it reached the horizon line where stretched a fragment of the primitive