It was early in April, an hour before sunset. The keen wind that blew down through the valley, sweeping the forge pond into little ripples, was tinkling with spring sounds,—wayside voices of robin, meadow-lark, purple finch, and cheery song sparrow; the red-wing’s good-night blending with the piping of the marsh frogs; music of little brooks newly born of melted ice and spring rain on the rocky hillsides; here and there the chime of cow bells worn by Peter Salop’s rambling herd returning from their first day’s browsing in the brush lots,—all blended into the steady rhythm of the water as it fell in an unbroken sheet from the pond’s edge upon the rocks below. Spring rushed toward the ear that evening more swiftly than to the eye. There were yellow tassels of fragrant spice-bush in moist warm hollows, echoing in tint the winter-flowering witch-hazel; wands of glistening willow outlined the waterways, and the red glow of life lay upon the swamp maples; but only the eyes of the wise might hope to find the hiding-places of the white and rathe blue hepaticas, or the nooks deep in the hemlock woods where the wax-pink arbutus distilled fragrance from the leaf mould. As the sun slowly vanished behind the long chain of hills beyond the Moosatuck, the warmth of the first spring day swiftly followed, and soon the sky was barred with the dull red-purple and citron that promised unwelcome frosts. In all the countryside but two people were to be seen out-of-doors or in any way seemingly conscious of the evening’s beauty, and these were alien born; Peter Salop, the owner of the pond, mill, and forge, and Ivan Gronski, his hired helper. Peter was English born, a portly and comfortable man of sixty odd, who, having come over in his youth, had made a little money by city trade. Once upon a time he had gone home again to pick up the old life for middle-aged rest, but though the land was there, the people that made the life had vanished. Now coming for the second time, he had settled in our hill country near his sons, and because he was born in a mill, a mill he must own, and, because as a boy he had loved to creep into a neighbour’s forge and watch the molten metal take shape, a forge he must have, even though its work was no more ambitious than turning scrap iron into cheap ploughs and third-grade tools.