"I wish to God," he said quaveringly, "'at every creature on earth was as well fixed as me an' the redbird!" Clasping each other, they listened with rapt faces, as, mellowing across the corn field, came the notes of the Cardinal: "So dear! So dear!" After that Abram's devotion to his bird family became a mild mania. He carried food to the top rail of the line fence every day, rain or shine, with the same regularity that he curried and fed Nancy in the barn. From caring for and so loving the Cardinal, there grew in his tender old heart a welling flood of sympathy for every bird that homed on his farm. He drove a stake to mark the spot where the killdeer hen brooded in the corn field, so that he would not drive Nancy over the nest. When he closed the bars at the end of the lane, he always was careful to leave the third one down, for there was a chippy brooding in the opening where it fitted when closed. Alders and sweetbriers grew in his fence corners undisturbed that spring if he discovered that they sheltered an anxious-eyed little mother. He left a square yard of clover unmowed, because it seemed to him that the lark, singing nearer the Throne than any other bird, was picking up stray notes dropped by the Invisible Choir, and with unequalled purity and tenderness, sending them ringing down to his brooding mate, whose home and happiness would be despoiled by the reaping of that spot of green. He delayed burning the brush-heap from the spring pruning, back of the orchard, until fall, when he found it housed a pair of fine thrushes; for the song of the thrush delighted him almost as much as that of the lark. He left a hollow limb on the old red pearmain apple-tree, because when he came to cut it there was a pair of bluebirds twittering around, frantic with anxiety. His pockets were bulgy with wheat and crumbs, and his heart was big with happiness. It was the golden springtime of his later life. The sky never had seemed so blue, or the earth so beautiful. The Cardinal had opened the fountains of his soul; life took on a new colour and joy; while every work of God manifested a fresh and heretofore unappreciated loveliness. His very muscles seemed to relax, and new strength arose to meet the demands of his uplifted spirit. He had not finished his day's work with such ease and pleasure in years; and he could see the influence of his rejuvenation in Maria. She was flitting around her house with broken snatches of song, even sweeter to Abram's ears than the notes of the birds; and in recent days he had noticed that she dressed particularly for her afternoon's sewing, putting on her Sunday lace collar and a white apron. He immediately went to town and bought her a finer collar than she ever had owned in her life. Then he hunted a sign painter, and came home bearing a number of pine boards on which gleamed in big, shiny black letters: