When spring came, bringing daffodils in the orchard, and primrose stars under the alder bushes in the meadow, and tiny green shoots on the hedges, and singing of larks and cawing of jackdaws and twitter of linnets, and all the other dear delights of the "return of Proserpine", Walden also celebrated a birthday. It was a year since the Watsons had obtained possession of their little property. To them all it had been a glad, golden, glorious year, full of fresh interests, new awakenings, and hitherto undreamed-of experiences. They had been living spiritually on a far higher plane; almost unconsciously the influence of hills and wide skies and dashing waters had passed into their lives and widened them. So much of what we are in our after years depends on the standard of happiness we form when we are quite young. If we learn to take Nature's hand and read in her book, she can teach us wonderful secrets, and lift our souls so that we can never again be really narrow, or vulgar, or petty, or commonplace. It is not the mere fact of living in the country that gives this inner vision. Too often country dwellers go about with closed eyes and sealed hearts to the meaning of the beauty around them; but to those who will listen to Mother Nature's many voices, there comes a wonderful refinement and purity of taste, quite irrespective of wealth or class distinctions, the mark of the spirit that is daily growing, overmastering the claims of the physical body, and fitting itself for something that as yet we only grasp at but cannot reach. God must love His children very dearly to send them such beautiful things as the April sunshine, and the light on the hills, and the white spray of the whirling waterfall, and the violets in the hazel coppice. They may spoil His earth for themselves, but the springtime comes again, and the little heartsease flowers will bloom, not only over those graves in France, but over deeper graves of fallen hopes and lost ideals. Mrs. Watson reviewed the year at Walden as so much gain. To begin with, her primary object in the removal had been an entire success: Daphne, formerly pale, thin, and an object for anxiety, was now as radiant as a pink-tipped daisy, and pronounced by the specialist to be absolutely fit and sound. She spent most of her time out of doors, gardening and looking after her colony of fowls, and, though she might not be doing definite war work, felt that she was helping her country by the production of food-stuffs. Daphne had suddenly grown very pretty. Avelyn, who often looked at her critically, decided that point emphatically. It was a delicate, ethereal, elusive kind of beauty, due as much to expression as to straight features and smiling grey eyes. Daphne never came out well in a photograph--that was quite a recognized fact in the family; to appreciate her, you had to see her when she was excited, or gardening, with her hair rumpled.