"I wasn't afraid," she answered; "and, Father, I want to ask a favor of you." Her voice had the eager pleading of a child's. "I want you to go walkin' with me in the woods next Sunday, just like we used to do when I was a little girl." Something in her voice and the words "when I was a little girl" touched a chord of memory that had not vibrated for many a year. Perhaps the tired, hard-worked man had a glimpse of the meagerness of his child's life, for he laid his rough hand over hers and spoke with the voice she remembered he had used when she was "a little girl." "Why, that's a curious notion, Mirandy," he said. "What'll the preacher say, if he hears we've gone walkin' in the woods on Sunday instead of goin' to church? But I'll go just to please you, provided the weather's suitable. Now, le's shut up the house and go to bed. It's time everybody was asleep." They went in together, and while her father closed the doors and put down the windows in anticipation of the coming rain, Miranda lighted her lamp in the kitchen and went softly up-stairs. She still felt the delicious sleepiness that comes from breathing outdoor air all day, and her nap in the woods seemed only to have given her a longing for more sleep. At the head of the stairs were the soap and water still waiting to be used, but she could look at them now without any of the irritation she had felt that morning, for she knew the hidden meaning of the work that lay before her. Was not Nature cleaning the whole earth, purifying it with her sunshine and her wind, and washing it with her dew and rain? If men and women could only live in the wind and sun with no shelter but the branches of the trees! But since they must have houses, these, too, must know the wholesome touch of wind, sun, and water. Lovely pictures of clouds, trees, fields, birds, and flowers filled her brain and made more apparent the ugliness of her room. Her sense of smell, sharpened by breathing forest air, took instant note of the musty odors that came from walls, floors, and clothing. She pushed the bedstead near the window so that she might feel the night air blowing over her face as she slept and resolved that the next night should find that room as like to a nook in the woods as she could make it; and when the scrubbing and whitewashing were over, she would go again and again to the woods and gather the flowers of spring, summer, and autumn to sweeten the air of the old house. As she blew out the lamp, there was a rumble of thunder from the west; a wind with the smell of rain swept through the dark room, and, laying her head on the pillow, she smiled to think how the creatures of the forest would look and feel in the scented night and the falling rain. All the spring landscape on which she had gazed that day seemed imprinted on her brain, and when she closed her eyes, it passed like a panorama before her inner vision: wind-swept trees whose leafy