Moving out on the sunken stone of the door-step, she was still unable to tell with certainty whether the japonicas were actually budding. She stood peering helplessly, almost frowning in her effort to see. It was really important that she should know as soon as possible. The coming of spring was important to everybody in the Pennyroyal Region, where every man was a farmer--the merchant, the lawyer, the doctor, and even the minister; and where every woman had a garden, large and rich like old lady Gordon's, or small and poor as Miss Judy's was. And the buds of the japonica were the gay little heralds of the spring, coming clad all in scarlet satin, while the rest of nature wore dull and sombre robes. Flashing out from their dark hiding-places at the first touch of the sun, the sight of them stirred the ladies of Oldfield as nothing else ever did. The men, too, always noticed this first sign of spring's approach. But it was the burning of the tobacco-beds on the wooded hillsides, the floating of long, thin banners of pale blue smoke across a wintry sky, which moved the men. It was only in the breasts of the gentle gardeners of Oldfield that the bursting forth of the japonica buds, these vivid points of flame, always fired a perennial ambition. For the housewife who could send a neighbor the earliest cool, green lettuce, or the first warm, red radishes might well be a proud woman, and was a personage to be looked up to and to be envied during all the rest of the year. And was it not rather a pretty ambition and even a laudable one? Have not most of us noted pettier ambitions and far less laudable ones in a much larger world?