At the sign of the shadbush the doors of my springtime swing wide open. My birds are back, my turtles are out, my long sleeping woodchucks are wide awake. There is not a stretch of woodland or meadow now that shows a trace of winter. Over the pasture the bluets are beginning to drift, as if the haze on the distant hills, floating down in the night, had been caught in the dew-wet grass. They wash the field to its borders in their delicate azure hue. At the sign of the shadbush the doors of my memory, too, swing wide open, and I am a boy again in the meadows of my old home. The shadbush is in blossom, and the fish are running--the sturgeon up the Delaware; the shad up Cohansey Creek; and through the Lower Sluice, these soft, stirring nights, the catfish are slipping. Is there any real boy now in Lupton’s Meadows to watch them come? Oh yes, doubtless; and doubtless there ever shall be. But I would go down for this one night, down in the May moonlight, and listen, as I used to listen years ago, for the quiet _splash splash splash_, as the swarming catfish pass through the shallows of the main ditch, up toward the dam at the pond. At the sign of the shadbush how swiftly the tides of life begin to rise! How mysteriously their currents run!--the fish swimming in from the sea, the birds flying up from the South, the flowers opening fresh from the soil, the insects coming out from their sleep: life moving everywhere--across the heavens, over the earth, along the deep, dim aisles of the sea! CHAPTER II THE SPRING RUNNING This title is Kipling’s; the observations that follow are mine; but the real spring running is yours and mine and Kipling’s and Mowgli the wolf-child’s, whose running Kipling has told us about. Indeed, every child of the earth has felt it, has had the running--every living thing of the land and the sea. Everything feels it; everything is restless, everything is moving. The renter changes houses; the city dweller goes “down to the shore” or up to the mountains to open his summer cottage; the farmer starts to break up the land for planting; the schoolchildren begin to squirm in their seats and long to fly out of the windows; and “Where are you _going_ this summer?” is on every one’s lips. They have all caught the spring running, the only infection I know that you can catch from April skies. The very sun has caught it, too, and is lengthening out his course, as if he hated to stop and go to bed at night. And the birds, that are supposed to go to bed most promptly, they sleep, says the good old poet Chaucer, with open eye, these April nights, so bad is their case of spring running,-- “So priketh hem Nature in hir corages.”[1] [Footnote 1: So nature pricks (stirs) them in their hearts.] Their long journey northward over sea and land has not cured them yet of their unrest. Only one thing will do it (and I suppose we all should be glad), one sovereign remedy, and that is _family cares_. But they are yet a long way off.