Some time in the night the tender gray spring mists that the hot afternoon sun had coaxed up from all the meadowy places realized that they were deserted, lost in the darkness. The young moon had gone decorously to bed at nine o’clock, pulling certain cloud puffs of white down over even the tip of her nose, that she might not be tempted to come out and dance with these lovely pale creatures. They were dancing then, but later they trembled together in fright, for the kindly stars, their shining eyes grown tremulous with tender tears, vanished too, withdrawn behind the black haze which the north wind sends before it. A nimbus, wind-blown from distant mountain tops, was spreading over the zenith, and through it the gentle spring mists heard resound the crack of doom, the voice of the north wind itself, made up of echoes of crashing ice floes out of Hudson’s Bay and the Arctic. Then the spring mists fled to earth again, but had no strength left to enter in. Instead, they lay there dead, covering all things a half-inch deep with soft bodies of purest white, and we looked forth in the morning and said that there had been a robin-snow. It is a pity that those gentle, innocent gray-blue spring mists should die, even to be lovely in death as they are, but it is their way of getting back home. In the morning the repentant sun came and dissolved the white, silent ones into gentle tears,--dayborn dew that slipped down among the grass roots and laid moist cheeks close to daisy and violet buds as they went by, and almost loved them into bloom. A few more robin-snows and they will all be out. Very likely somewhere a dandelion, some sturdy, rough-and-ready youngster, quivered into yellow florescence at the caress. Robin-snows and the cajoling sun of the last week of March often make summer enough for this honest, fearless flower. Quite likely the tender joy of the mists at getting back safe to earth under the caress of the eager sun, and their terror of the north wind, which still rumbles by in the upper air, are both nascent on such days, for you have but to go out to feel them, and they inevitably lead you out of the raw mire of the highways, across the wind-swept pasture, into wood roads. These on such days have an atmosphere of their own. Here the thrill of the sun is as potent as the push of the X-ray. It slips through clothes and flesh, nor do bones stay it till it tingles in the marrow, a vitalizing fire that is soothed and nourished by the soft essence of those dead mists, now glowing upward from the moist humus. No wonder the woodland things come to life and grow again at the touch! The north wind may howl high above. Here under the trees the soft airs that breathe out of Eden touch you and you know that just round the curve of the road is the very gate itself.