In the woods he felt that curious thrill of stealth, that impulse to cautious concealment, which survives in man from the remote days when enemies beset his forest ways. On a southern hillside he found a dogwood-tree with its blossomed firmament of white stars. In low, moist places the violets had sprung through the thatch of leaves and were singing their purple beauties all unheard. Birds were nesting, and squirrels chattered and scolded. Under these more obvious signs and sounds went the steady undertone of life in root and branch and unfurling leaf--provoking, inciting, making lawless whomsoever it thrilled. He came out of the wood on to another road that ran not far from the river, and set off again to the north along the beaten track. In an old-fashioned garden in front of a small house a girl bent over a flower bed, working with a trowel. He stopped and looked at her over the palings. She was freshly pretty, with yellow hair blown about her face under the pushed back sunbonnet of blue. The look in her blue eyes was the look of one who had heard echoes; who had awakened with the spring to new life and longings, mysterious and unwelcome, but compelling. She stood up when he spoke; her sleeves were turned prettily back upon her fair round arms. "Yes, the road turns to the left, a bit ahead." She was blushing. "You are planting flower seeds." "Yes; so many flowers were killed by the cold last winter." "I see; there must a lot of them have died here, but their souls didn't go far, did they now?" She went to digging again in the black moist earth. He lingered. The girl worked on, and her blush deepened. He felt a lawless impulse to vault the palings, and carry her off to be a flower for ever in some wooded glade near by. He dismissed it as impracticable. His intentions would probably be misconstrued. "I hope your garden will thrive. It has a pretty pattern to follow." "Thank you!" He raised his hat and passed on, thinking; thinking of all the old dead flowers, and their pretty souls that had gone to bloom in the heaven of the maid's face. Before the road turned to the left he found a path leading over to the top of the palisade. There on a little rocky shelf, hundreds of feet above the river, he lay a long time in the spring sun, looking over to the farther shore, where the city crept to the south, and lost its sharp lines in the smoky distance. There he smoked and gave himself up to the moment. He was glad to be out of that rush. He could see matters more clearly now--appraise values more justly. He was glad of everything that had come. Above all, glad to go back and carry on that big work of his father's--his father who had done so much to redeem the wilderness--and incidentally he would redeem his own manhood.