To-day she had awakened with the first glimmer of dawn, and stirred by a sudden desire for the air of the morning on her face and in her lungs, had stolen up and out. Breathing in the resinous atmosphere a new influx of life seemed to run like sap along her limbs, and lend her step the buoyancy of a wood-nymph’s. Her eye lingered with a look that was a caress on flower and tree and shrub. The song she had been humming passed from tune to words, and she sang softly as she brushed through the chaparral, snipping off a leaf, bending to pluck a wild flower, pausing to admire the glossy green of a manzanita bush. Under the shadow of the pines she halted by a rugged trunk, a point of vantage she had early discovered, and leaning her hand on the bark, surveyed the wild prospect. The sense of expectancy in the air seemed intensified. The quivering radiance of pink and gold pulsed up the sky from a point of concentration which every moment brightened. The blue shadows in the camp grew thinner, the little wisps of mist that hung over the river more threadlike and phantasmal. A throwback to unremembered days came suddenly upon her with a mysterious sense of familiarity. She seemed to be repeating a dear, long dead experience. The vision and the dream of days of exquisite well-being, carefree, cherished, were with her again. Faint recurring glimpses of such mornings, strong of balsam of pine and fir, musical with the sleepy murmur of a river, serene and sweet with an enfolding passion of love in which she rested secure, rose out of the dim places of memory. The perfect content of her childhood spoke to her across the gulf of years, finding itself repeated in her womanhood. The old joy in living, the old thrill of wonder and mystery, the old sense of safety in a surrounding, watchful love, were hers once more. The song on her lips passed from its absent undertone to notes gradually full and fuller. It was the aria from “Mignon,” and, as she stood, her hand on the tree trunk, looking down into the swimming shadows of the camp, it swelled outward in tones strong and rich, vibrating with their lost force. Pervaded by a sense of dreamy happiness, she at first failed to notice the unexpected volume of sound. Then, as note rose upon note, welling from her chest with the old-time, vibrant facility, as she felt once again the uplifting sense of triumph possess her, she realized what it meant. Dropping her hand from the tree trunk she stood upright, and facing the dawn, with squared shoulders and raised chin, let her voice roll out into the void before her. The song swelled triumphant like a hymn of some pagan goddess to the rising sun. In the stillness of the dawn-hush, with the columns of the monumental pines behind her, the mountain wall and the glowing sky in front, she might have been the spirit of youth and love chanting her joy in a primeval world.