Then it would fret between its banks until the spangled frills of the mimulus were all tattered with its spray. Often at the end of the summer it was worn quite thin and small with running, and not able to do more than reach the meadow. “But some day,” it whispered to the stones, “I shall run quite away.” If the stream had been inclined for it, there was no lack of good company on its own borders. Birds nested in the willows, rabbits came to drink; one summer a bobcat made its lair up the bank opposite the brown birches, and often the deer fed in the meadow. In the spring of one year two old men came up into the Canyon of Pinon Pines. They had been miners and partners together for many years. They had grown rich and grown poor, and had seen many hard places and strange times. It was a day when the creek ran clear and the south wind smelled of the earth. Wild bees began to whine among the willows, and the meadow bloomed over with poppy-breasted larks. Then said one of the old men: “Here is good meadow and water enough; let us build a house and grow trees. We are too old to dig in the mines.” “Let us set about it,” said the other; for that is the way with two who have been a long time together,--what one thinks of, the other is for doing. So they brought their possessions, and they built a house by the water border and planted trees. One of the men was all for an orchard but the other preferred vegetables. So they did each what he liked, and were never so happy as when walking in the garden in the cool of the day, touching the growing things as they walked, and praising each other's work. They were very happy for three years. By this time the stream had become so interested it had almost forgotten about running away. But every year it noted that a larger bit of the meadow was turned under and planted, and more and more the men made dams and ditches by which to turn the water into their gardens. “In fact,” said the stream, “I am being made into an irrigating ditch before I have had my fling in the world. I really must make a start.” That very winter, by the help of a great storm, the stream went roaring down the meadow, over the mesa, and so clean away, with only a track of muddy sand to show the way it had gone. All that winter the two men brought water for drinking from a spring, and looked for the stream to come back. In the spring they hoped still, for that was the season they looked for the orchard to bear. But no fruit grew on the trees, and the seeds they planted shriveled in the earth. So by the end of summer, when they understood that the water would not come back at all, they went sadly away. Now the Creek of Pinon Pines did not have a happy time. It went out in the world on the wings of the storm, and was very much tossed about and mixed up with other waters, lost and bewildered.