At last the rains were over.  The sun came out again, and with it the growth of the season burst into abundance.  There were bird-notes on the air, fragrance in the stillness, bloom on the trees.  In the thicket dogwood massed itself in clouds of dead-white stars, like an errant trail from the Milky Way, lighting the wooded twilight.  Wild azalea, so deeply rose that the hue seemed of the blood, wafted its sharp, unearthly scent across the underbrush to the road.  The woods were vocal with the mating songs of their winged inhabitants.  The music of the thrush welled from the sheer forceful joy of living.  “It is good—­good—­good to be a lover!” he sang again and again with amorous repetition and a full-throated flourish of improvisation.  In the pauses of the thrush sounded the cheery whistle of the redbird, the crying of the catbird, the liquid tones of the song sparrow, and the giddy exclamations of the pewee.  Sometimes an oriole darted overhead in a royal flash of black and yellow, a robin stood in the road and delivered a hearty invitation, or a hawk flew past, pursued by martins.

With the spring planting came a chance of outdoor work, and Nicholas would sometimes rise at dawn and do a piece of ploughing before breakfast.  He had driven the team out one morning across the brown, bare earth, which the plough had ripped open in a jagged track, when something in the silence and the scents of nature smote him suddenly as with a vital force.  Dropping the reins to the ground, he threw back his head and breathed a keen, quick sense of exaltation.  A warm mist, sweet and fresh as the breath of a cow, overhung hill and field, road and meadow.  In a black-browed cedar tree a mocking-bird was singing.

With a sudden shout Nicholas voiced the glorification of toil—­of honest work well done.  He felt with the force of a revelation that to throw up the clods of earth manfully is as beneficent as to revolutionise the world.  It was not the matter of the work, but the mind that went into it, that counted—­and the man who was not content to do small things well would leave great things undone.  The beasts before him did not shirk their labour because it was clay and not gold dust that trailed behind the plough; why should he?  And where was happiness if it sprung not from the soil?  Where contentment if it dwelt not near to Nature?  For what was better than these things—­the clear air of sunrise, the keen, sweet smell of the fertile earth, the relaxation of tired muscles?  Why should he, who had been born to the soil, struggle forth to alien ends as a sightless earthworm to the harrow’s teeth?

On his way in from the fields he stopped an instant at the gate of the barnyard to look at the red-and-white cow that was licking her little, tottering calf.  Some rollicking lambs were skipping near a dignified group of ewes, that looked on with half-fearful, half-disapproving faces.

At the pump he saw his stepmother filling a water bucket, and he took it from her hands.