When I made him know that sure, he lifted his arms and let them drop; and he come on down the path with me, and he stood there by the syringa bush at the gate, looking off down the little swelling hill to where the village nestled at the foot. School was just out, and the children were flooding down the road, and the whole time was peaceful and spacious and close-up-to, like a friend. We stood still for a minute, while I was thinking that; and when I turned to Jeffro, he stood with the tears running down his cheeks. "To think there is such a place," he said reverently. "And me in it. And them going to be here." Then he looked at me like he was seeing more than his words were saying. "I keep thinking," he said, "how hard God is vorking, all over the earth--and how good He's succeeded here." Up to the gate run little Joseph, his school-books in his arms. Jeffro put both hands on the boy. "Little citizen, little citizen," his father said. And it was like one way of being baptized. II When I was a little girl, a cardinal bird came one summer and nested in our yard. They almost never come so far north, and I loved him like a friend. When autumn came, the other birds all went, but he didn't go. And one day, in the first snow and high wind, he was storm-beaten into our little porch, and we caught him. We dare not let him go, in the cold. So we kept him until he died. I shall never forget the change that the days made. I cannot bear to tell or to think about the change in him that the days made. That is why I will never have about me a caged thing, bird or beast or spirit. The cardinal helped me to understand. I wonder if the death of any beauty or any life is as much Nature's will as we still think it is.... This is why I shrink from telling what next happened to Jeffro--what I knew must happen to him if he came here and lived the life of his kind--of my kind. Lived it, I mean, with his eyes open. There are plenty who live it and never know anything about it, after all. But Jeffro would know. He had seeing eyes, and his heart was the heart of a child, and his face was always surprised--surprised, but believing it all too, and trusting the good. He trusted the good just as you and I did, in the beginning. Just as you and I do, in the end. But in between the two trusts there comes a black time; and if it hasn't come to you, then you don't know the Big Land; and you don't see what's going on in it; and you haven't questioned where it's all going to lead. As, after a while, Jeffro questioned it.