“Oh, come, Mr. Everett, LeMaury an American!  With that name!”

“He called himself LeMaury after his protector, the man who brought him to France.  His real name was Everett, like my own.  He was cousin to one of my great-grandfathers.”

“Ah, an old family story.  That is the best kind.  You must tell it to me.”

“I will write it for you, madame.”

I

At the foot of Hemlock Mountain spring came late that year, now a century and a half gone by, as it comes late still to the remote back valley, lying high among the Green Mountains; but when it came it had a savor of enchantment unknown to milder regions.  The first day of spring was no uncertain date in Hillsboro, then as now.  One morning generally about the middle of May, people woke up with the sun shining in their eyes, and the feeling in their hearts that something had happened in the night.  The first one of the family dressed, who threw open the house-door, felt the odor of stirring life go to his head, was the Reverend Mr. Everett himself.  In the little community of Puritans, whose isolation had preserved intact the rigidity of faith which had begun to soften somewhat in other parts of New England, there was no one who openly saluted the miracle of resurrection by more than the brief remark, “Warm weather’s come”; but sometimes the younger men went back and kissed their wives.  It was an event, the first day of spring, in old-time Hillsboro.

In the year of our Lord 1756 this event fell upon a Sabbath, a fact which the Reverend Mr. Everett commemorated by a grim look out at the budding trees, and by taking from his store of sermons a different one from that he had intended to preach.  It was his duty to scourge natural man out of the flock committed to his charge by an angry and a jealous God, and he had felt deep within him a damnable stirring of sensual pleasure as the perfumed breath of the new season had blown across his face.  If the anointed of the Lord had thus yielded to the insidious wiles of unregenerate nature what greater dangers lay in wait for the weaklings under his care!  The face of his son Nathaniel, as he came back from the brook, his slender body leaning sideways from the weight of the dripping bucket, told the shepherd of souls that he must be on his guard against the snares of the flesh.

The boy’s thin, dark face, so astonishingly like his father’s, was lifted toward the sky as he came stumbling up the path, but his eyes were everywhere at once.  Just before he reached the door, he set the bucket down with a cry of ecstasy and darted to the edge of the garden, where the peas were just thrusting green bowed heads through the crumbling earth.  He knelt above them breathless, he looked up to the maple-twigs, over which a faint reddish bloom had been cast in the night, beyond to the lower slopes of the mountain, delicately patterned with innumerable white stems of young birch-trees, and clasped his hands to see that a shimmer of green hung in their tops like a mist.  His lips quivered, he laid his hand upon a tuft of grass with glossy, lance-like blades, and stroked it.