was clear. There had been no snow, but there were little pools of ice about, and Jane took each one with a slide. She felt a tingling sense of youth and excitation. Back of the garage was a shadowy grove of tall pines which sang and sighed as the wind swept them. There was a young moon above the pines. It seemed to Jane that her soul was lifted to it. She flung up her arms to the moon, and the yellow cape billowed about her.

The shed where the chickens were kept was back[16] of the garage. When Jane opened the door, her old Persian cat, Merrymaid, came out to her, and a puff-ball of a kitten. Jane snapped on the lights in the chicken-house and the biddies stirred. When she snapped them off again, she heard them settle back to sheltered slumber.

[16]

The kitten danced ahead of her, and the old cat danced too, as the wind whirled her great tail about. “We won’t go in the house—we won’t go in the house,” said Jane, in a sort of conversational chant, as the pussies followed her down a path which led through the pines. She often walked at this hour—and she loved it best on nights like this.

She felt poignantly the beauty of it—the dark pines and the little moon above them—the tug of the wind at her cloak like a riotous playmate.

Baldy was not the only poet in the family, but Jane’s love of beauty was inarticulate. She would never be able to write it on paper or draw it with a pencil.

Down the path she went, the two pussy-cats like small shadows in her wake, until suddenly a voice came out of the dark.

“I believe it is little Jane Barnes.”

She stopped. “Oh, is that you, Evans? Isn’t it a heavenly night?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Don’t talk that way.”

“Why not?”

[17]“Because an evening like this is like wine—it goes to my head.”

[17]

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