[6] Our author resists firmly all arguments in favor of the generally accepted dictionary spelling, “emptyings.”  He says that the term can not possibly come from any such idea as things which are emptied, or emptied out.  The editor is reconciled to this view in the light of James Russell Lowell’s discussion of “emptins” in which he says:  “Nor can I divine the original.”  Mr. Lowell surely must have considered “emptyings”—­and rejected it.—­G.v.d.M.

I watched her with a buying eye, as she circled like a pointer pup and finally caught up with the wagon, a full mile on to the westward.  I had wondered once if she had not deserted the Fewkes party forever.  I had even, such is the imagination of boyhood, made plans and lived them through in my mind, which put Rowena on the nigh end of the spring seat, and made her a partner with me in opening up the new farm.  But she waved her hand as she joined her family—­or I thought so at least, and waved back—­and was gone.

The Gowdy outfit did not return until after I had about cured the lameness of my newly-acquired cows and set out on my way over the Old Ridge Road for the West.  The spring was by this time broadening into the loveliest of all times on the prairies (when the weather is fine), the days of the full blowth of the upland bird’s-foot violets.  Some southern slopes were so blue with them that you could hardly tell the distant hill from the sky, except for the greening of the peeping grass.  The possblummies were still blowing, but only the later ones.  The others were aging into tassels of down.

The Canada geese, except for the nesters, had swept on in that marvelous ranked army which ends the migration, spreading from the east to the west some warm morning when the wind is south, and extending from a hundred feet in the air to ten thousand, all moved by a common impulse like myself and my fellow-migrants, pressing northward though, instead of westward, with the piping of a thousand organs, their wings whirring, their eyes glistening as if with some mysterious hope, their black webbed feet folded and stretched out behind, their necks strained out eagerly to the north, and held a little high I thought as if to peer over the horizon to catch a glimpse of their promised land of blue lakes, tall reeds, and broad fields of water-celery and wild rice, with dry nests downy with the harvests of their gray breasts; and fluffy goslings swimming in orderly classes after their teachers.  And up from the South following these old honkers came the snow geese, the Wilson geese, and all the other little geese (we ignorantly called all of them “brants"), with their wild flutings like the high notes of clarinets—­and the ponds became speckled with teal and coot.