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He looked scornfully at the back yard, generous in size, after the fashion of our Southern cities, and shaded with fine old trees. But a little later, high in the hackberry, his love of all earth-rooted things swept contempt from his heart, and his dark old face shone with happiness as he wielded the hatchet with rhythmic strokes.

That is always the beginning of the spring work—the severance of death from life, that life may rise again, even out of death. Where would life draw this dead matter next? To darkness first, to growth most surely, and perchance, some day, to wings. And the dark old man with the happy face was servitor of life—life for the dead as for the living; for death is but the underside of life.

We went home early in May. The house would not be finished until October; but outdoors was all ready for us, and we could not waste the summer for lack of a house.

“You know,” I argued to the Peon, “we had a beautiful time in the mountains last summer; and we slept in a two-roomed cottage with only weather-boarding between us and the trees outside. Why can’t we have a shed with a gasoline stove, and a couple of tents to live in?”