never can anywhere else. I want to explore all those fields and lonely places anyhow. I have a conviction that there are scores of beautiful nooks there that have never really been seen although they may have been looked at. We’ll make friends with wind and sky and sun, and bring home the spring in our hearts.”
“It sounds awfully nice,” said Diana, with some inward distrust of Anne’s magic of words. “But won’t it be very damp in some places yet?”
“Oh, we’ll wear rubbers,” was Anne’s concession to practicalities. “And I want you to come over early Saturday morning and help me prepare lunch. I’m going to have the daintiest things possible . . . things that will match the spring, you understand . . . little jelly tarts and lady fingers, and drop cookies frosted with pink and yellow icing, and buttercup cake. And we must have sandwiches too, though they’re not very poetical.”
Saturday proved an ideal day for a picnic . . . a day of breeze and blue, warm, sunny, with a little rollicking wind blowing across meadow and orchard. Over every sunlit upland and field was a delicate, flower-starred green.
Mr. Harrison, harrowing at the back of his farm and feeling some of the spring witch-work even in his sober, middle-aged blood, saw four girls, basket laden, tripping across the end of his field where it joined a fringing woodland of birch and fir. Their blithe voices and laughter echoed down to him.
“It’s so easy to be happy on a day like this, isn’t
