“I am sure that no one has told you—­and that no one will tell you unless I do—­that the chickweed is looking exceedingly fresh and spring-like between the box-borders.  Further—­a patch of small white violets is to be discovered in the sunny spots beyond the sweet pea trellis.  I have a bunch of them pinned on my coat at this moment, purloined by my own hand, and smelling like spring itself.  The daffodils are gorgeous, and a small blue flower which gives forth a modest and unobtrusive odour all its own is to be found in clumps in several places.

“Alec tells me he has written you all about the progress of the early spring work, but you may possibly be still more interested in the human culture going on upon Strawberry Acres, in which he is bearing an important part.  To-day he and Burnside, protected by blue jeans and looking highly disreputable, have been spraying the apple orchard.  A disagreeable job it looks to be, from the standpoint of cleanliness, although a necessary one.  But whenever I appeared, as an interested spectator on the scene, Alec was toiling away with the greatest good humour, which did not fail him when the apparatus suddenly stopped working properly, and had to be nursed and tended through at least the final third of the operation.

“I believe your brother Max is beginning to long to leave the bank and to begin his life upon the farm.  In spite of his somewhat satirical comments upon the probable folly of Alec’s having taken this step, I am confident he himself would like to try it.  Another spring will see him burning his bridges, or I am no prophet.

“No one, Miss Sally, could be thrown, as your brothers are with such a fellow as Jarvis Burnside, without being stimulated to action.  He is the most thoroughly alive recent college graduate I know of in any line of work.  It’s a refreshing sight to me, to see a man with all the instincts for a literary life, but handicapped by the necessity for taking care of his eyesight, throw himself with such ardour into labour which would have seemed the very last he would have been likely to care for.  On my word, I don’t know when I admire him most—­when, in his careful dress he sits down to his books and journals in the evening, getting Alec to read aloud to him when he has reached the limit of safety for his own eyes, talking to the lad in a way to wake the boy up—­as he is most certainly doing—­or when I see him at such a job as he tackled to-day, putting into it the care and precision of your true scientist and experimenter with intent to get the full result of the best directed effort possible.  Wherever you put him, he’s a man worth knowing—­and I’m glad I know him and have him for a friend.”

“I like to hear one man praise another like that,” commented Sally to herself, as having finished the letter, which recounted briefly what Mrs. Ferry and Janet were doing and conveyed messages from both, she turned back to re-read the whole.  Then she took up Jarvis’s letter, wondering if he might chance to refer to Donald Ferry in as high terms as those in which he had himself been mentioned.