Stud Brailsford was a breeder famed throughout southern Wisconsin. He had a Poland China boar, a Jersey bull, and a Percheron stallion which were the talk of the countryside. He had cornfed sows which looked like minor blimps wallowing in his pig yards and scratching their ample backs against mail-order scratching posts which turned like screws twisting sinuous curls of soothing grease upward to salve the noble porcine flanks; soft-eyed Jersey cows whose pedigrees compared favorably with that of any reigning monarch; Shetland ponies, Shropshire sheep, and a small herd of goats. On the little pond which lay like a blue mirror in a hollow between the hills a quarter of a mile north of the house he had tame geese, three varieties of tame ducks, as well as wild mallards, pintails, redheads, and canvasbacks brought home wounded from the fall duck hunting, clipped and kept to propagate more of their species. Wild Canadian geese he also had whose honking overhead in the short flights they essayed about the farm had all the fierce challenge of their kind, all the longing for distant marshes, and the fire of spring. For spring was upon the land-- Spring had come rushing up the Mississippi valley out of the warm Gulf states, out of the bayous and river bottoms bringing the fragrance of wet earth and leaf mold, the sweet smell of sap running in the maples, the acrid smells of dung and marshland. At Rock Island, Illinois, spring, and the wild fowl, had turned off the main stream to follow the Rock River valley up through Rockford, Beloit, Janesville, until at last with a final onslaught they had taken Lake Koshkonong and the farms and oak woods along its shores. Overnight wildflowers bloomed on the hills, buttercups, anemones, dog violets, real violets, and the gaudy dandelions which children held beneath each other's chins to discover with great certainty who did and who did not like butter. Pickerel began to run up the creeks and back into the marshy bays of the lake; the little streams were flooded, and furry buds no larger than the ears of mice began to show on the black, gnarled branches of the oak trees. And spring to Stanley Brailsford meant plowing. "Hi up there, Bess!" he shouted. "Get a move on, Jinny." He guided the plow with one hand for a moment, using the other to slap the reins sharply across the sweating flanks of the team of mares. He turned them with an expert grace at the end of the furrow, went down along the fencerow and around the outer edge of the field. A dozen white chickens, two or three bold robins, and Shep, the mischievous young farm dog followed the furrow in an absurd parade. The birds were greedy for the pink angle-worms, fat, purple night-crawlers, and succulent grubs. The dog delighted in making the chickens leap six feet into the air with playful passes at their proud white tails.