“Isn’t she poetical, though?” Kit said, thoughtfully, as she knelt to make some soft meal for a new batch of Doris’s chicks. Carlota had read the letter aloud to the family at the breakfast table, and they could hear her now playing the piano and singing with Jean and Helen, “Pippa’s” song: “The year’s at the spring, And day’s at the morn.” “No wonder Carlota is posted on all the romance and poetry of the old world. All Helen has done since she came is moon around and imagine herself Rosamunda in her garden. It makes me tired with all the spring work hanging over to be done. How many broods does this make, Dorrie?” “Eight,” said Dorrie, “and more coming. Shad said he understood we were going to sell off all the incubated ones at ten cents apiece, and keep the real brooders for the family.” “Oh, dear!” Kit leaned back against the side of the barn, and looked lazily off at the widening valley vista before her. “I am so afraid that Dad will get too much interested in chicken raising and crops and soils and things, so that we’ll stay on here forever. Somehow I didn’t mind it half as much all through the winter time, but now that spring is here, it is just simply awful to have to pitch in and work from the rising of the sun even unto its going down. I want to be a ‘lily of the field.’” Overhead the great fleecy, white clouds sailed up from the south in a squadron of splendor. A new family of bluebirds lately hatched was calling hungrily from a nest in the old cherry tree nearby, and being scolded lustily by a catbird for lack of patience. There was a delicate haze lingering still over the woods and distant fields. The new foliage was out, but hardly enough to make any difference in the landscape’s coloring. After two weeks of almost daily showers there had come a spell of close warm weather that dried up the fields and woods, and left them as Cousin Roxy said “dry as tinder and twice as dangerous.” “How’s Billie?” asked Doris, suddenly. “I’ll be awfully glad when he’s out again.” “They’ve got him on the veranda bundled up like a mummy. He’s so topply that you can push him over with one finger-tip and Cousin Roxy treats him as if she had him wadded up in pink cotton. I think if they just stopped treating him like a half-sick person, and just let him do as he pleased he’d get well twice as fast.” Doris had been gazing up at the sky dreamily. All at once she said, “What a funny cloud that is over there, Kit.” It hung over a big patch of woods towards the village, a low motionless, pearl colored cloud, very peculiar looking, and very suspicious, and the odd part about it was that it seemed balanced on a base of cloud, like a huge mushroom or a waterspout in shape. “What on earth is that?” exclaimed Kit, springing to her feet. “That’s never a cloud, and it is right over the old Ames place. Do you suppose they’re out burning brush with the woods so dry?”