wood, bounded by smooth turnpikes and fenced-in fields and meadows. Serene and majestic these forest remnants stand in every Kentucky landscape, guardians of the Great Silence, homes for the hunted bird and beast, and sanctuaries where the stricken soul of man may find a miracle of healing. A wild, unreasonable longing possessed the homesick girl as she looked at that line of trees, softly green and faintly veiled, and thought of what lay in their secret deeps. All her life had been spent in the country, and yet how many years it had been since she had seen the woods in spring. _The woods in spring!_ The words were like a strain of music, and as she whispered them to herself, something rent the veil between childhood and womanhood, and she saw herself a little girl roaming through the forest, clinging to her father's hand and searching for spring's wild flowers. She saw the blue violets nestling at the foot of mossy stumps, columbines and ferns waving in damp, rocky places, purple hepaticas, yellow celandine, the pinkish lavender bells of the cowslip, Solomon's seal lifting its tiers of leaves by lichened rocks around a dripping spring, and that strange white flower, more like the corpse of a flower than the flower itself, that she had found once--and then no more--growing by a fallen log and half buried under the drift of fallen leaves. Suddenly she started up, hurried from the room, and ran swift-footed down-stairs and into the kitchen, where her mother stood at a table washing the breakfast dishes. "Mother," she said breathlessly, "I'm going over to the woods awhile. I want to see if the violets are in bloom yet. I'll be back after awhile." Ellen Crawford paused in her work and looked helplessly at her daughter. The mind of her child had always been a sealed book to her, and she was never without a feeling of apprehension as to what Miranda would do next. "For mercy's sake!" she said weakly. Going to the woods to look for violets in house-cleaning time, when each day's unfinished work overflowed into the brimming hours of the next day! There were no words to fit such folly, and the mother only stood stupefied, looking through the open door at the flying footsteps of her errant daughter.