"There be three things which are too wonderful for me, yea, four," saith the venerable and justly popular author of Proverbs, and he concludes and crowns the list with "the way of a man with a maid." He might have made the same comment regarding the way of a maid with a man, but either way is insignificant in comparison with the ways of an intelligent man and woman in the full flux and prime of life, and who have learned. There is a difference indescribable between youth and those who have come to the understanding comprehension of what is the greatest thing in the world. They own the consciousness of its magnitude, a knowledge which the others lack. Talk about love-making! Theirs is the unconscious, intense and honest art of the old masters. He dawdled on in his day dream: "You know about the dogs, don't you?"--she nodded--"and we'll have chickens, of course, far from the house and garden, snow-white Leghorns, since they lay voraciously--'voracious' is the word--and eggs are the spice of life. There'll be other things to eat, too, and in sunny cleared places in the wood there will be the most voluptuous asparagus and strawberry beds in the world, and, as for the eye and nose, your own flower garden, near the Shack,--Have we not talked of it, somewhere, before?--what a garden that will be! I know it already, because I know your fancies. No park gardening there, but the natural beauty and abandon of nature with a friend at hand. I can shut my eyes and see the roses and the dahlias and the hollyhocks and the old-fashioned pinks and the lilacs and all the old flowers and shrubs and a host of the newer ones which have won a deserved place since Plymouth Rock and Jamestown, and there is in my nostrils a blending of perfumes that makes any mention of Araby the Blest seem puerile, while the desert that 'shall rejoice and blossom as the rose' will be but as a sand spit compared with our responsive but untamed estate. "And," he continued, "there is a fad of my own which I have not yet mentioned. I am going to be a benefactor of mankind--I suppose it was in me and had to come out--and our jungle home will afford the opportunity for carrying out my beneficent designs. I am going to make a domestic bird of one of the most desirable of birds existent. I refer to the quail, the bird that whistles on country fences and doesn't on toast. I'm going to get a lot of them and treat them as if they were and had always been part of the family. They shall have a great wire-covered range and all conveniences of an outdoor home, and I'm going to keep on raising them and experimenting and trying until I have a really tame quail, one with atrophied wings and a trusting heart. That we'll do, dear, and coming generations shall rise up and call us blessed."