Oh, Grandma Wentworth was an authority on ministers--ministers and babies. And it was a baby that had kept her away from church this Lilac Sunday; a little, merry, red-headed boy baby that had come in the early morning to make glad the heart of unbusinesslike Billy Evans and his neat businesslike wife. For several hours Doc Philipps and Grandma had despaired of both baby and mother, but when the pink dawn came smiling over the world's rim Billy's little son was born alive and unblemished and Billy's wife crept back from the Valley of the Shadow and smiled a bit into Billy's white, stricken face. And Billy looked deep down into the brown eyes of the girl and the terrible numbness went out of his muscles and the icy hardness from around his heart and he slipped out into the morning world to thank the Great Spirit that moved it for His mercy and wonderful gift. He just stood on his front doorstep and, looking about his pretty home and remembering the miracle within the house, poured a great prayer into the heart of the glad morning. Billy's house was one of the most picturesque of the many pretty homes in Green Valley. It had been a ramshackle, tumbled-down old cabin lost in a tangle of bushes and hidden from the road by a shabby, unsightly row of old willows. Billy was going to rent it for temporary barn purposes but his wife, who had a nimble and a prophetic eye, made him buy it. Then, under her supervision Billy enlarged and remodeled it and Billy's wife waved some sort of a fairy wand over it, for it became over night a lovely, story-book home. When everything was ready she had the unsightly willows cut, revealing a gently rising stretch of mossy sward ending in a cluster of old trees from which the cozy house peeped roguishly, tantalizingly. Two old walnuts guarded the little footpath to the door and two huge lilac bushes screened the porch from the too curious gaze of travelers on the road below. Indeed, so altogether taking and fascinating a bit of property did it become after its transformation that it was said that two of Green Valley's real estate men never went down that road without doing sums in their heads and calling themselves names for overlooking such a bargain. It takes constructive imagination to be successful in real estate. And now around this cozy home spot Billy wandered deliriously, aimlessly. It was the tolling of the church bell and the smell of the lilacs that recalled to him the significance of the day. "Why, he was born on Lilac Sunday and he's red-headed just like Her. Gosh--I must a bin born lucky!" Billy looked once more all about his story-book home and then his eyes strayed away to Petersen's Woods, fairy green and already full of deep shadowed aisles, full of fretted beauty and solemnity. Beyond them lay the creek, a pool of silver draped in misty morning veils.