"Liva!" Timothy said again, "it ain't the pasture that's so differ'nt. It's _us_." She laughed a little--softly, and very near his coat sleeve. "I 'most knew that this afternoon," she answered. VI THE FOND FORENOON This morning Miggy came by appointment to do a little work for me, and she appeared in some "best" frock to honour the occasion. It was a blue silk muslin, cut in an antiquated style and trimmed with tarnished silver passementerie. In it the child was hardly less distinguished than she had been in her faded violet apron. It was impossible for her to seem to be unconscious of her dress, and she spoke of it at once with her fine directness. "I didn't have anything good enough to wear," she said. "I haven't got any good dress this summer till I get it made myself. I got this out of the trunk. It was my mother's." "It suits you very well, Miggy," I told her. "I thought maybe she'd like my wearing it--here," said Miggy, shyly. "You've got things the way she always wanted 'em." We went in my workroom and sat among my books and strewn papers. A lighted theatre with raised curtain and breathless audience, a room which one wakens to find flooded by a gibbous moon, these have for me no greater sorcery than morning in a little book-filled room, with the day before me. Perhaps it is that I ought to be doing so many things that I take an idler's delight in merely attending to my own occupation. While I wondered at what I should set Miggy, I looked for the spirit of the minute and tried not to see its skeleton. The skeleton was that I had here an inexperienced little girl who was of almost no use to me. The spirit was that whatever I chose to do, my work was delightful to me, and that to bring Miggy in contact with these things was a kind of adventure. It is, I find, seldom sufficient to think even of the body of one's work, which to-day proved to be in my case a search in certain old books and manuscripts for fond allusions. If one can, so to say, think in and out till one comes to the spirit of a task, then there will be evident an indeterminate sense of wings. Without these wings there can be no expression and no creation. And in the true democracy no work will be wingless. It will still be, please God, laborious, arduous, even heart-breaking, but never body-fettered, never with its birdlike spirit quenched. And in myself I would bring to pass, even now, this fair order of sweet and willing toil by taking to my hand no task without looking deep within for its essential life.