and eat the herbs and roots with me and I could have her to myself all alone.  Now, will you come on down to the spring?” And without waiting for my reply, Adam started down the hill, crosswise from the path by which I had ascended, padding ahead in his weird leather sandals and breaking a path for me through the undergrowth as I followed close at his shoulder, an order of rough travel to which I had become accustomed in the weeks that had passed and that now seemed to me—­well, I might say racial.

In the riot of an April growing day, in which we could hear life fairly teem and buzz at our feet, on right, and left, and overhead, Adam and I worked shoulder to shoulder in the old garden of Elmnest.  Every now and then I ran down to the spring to put a green fagot under the pot of herbs, which needed to simmer for hours to be as delicious as was possible for them.  From the library came a rattle and bang of literary musketry from the blessed parental twins, who were for the time being with Julius Caesar in “all Gaul,” and oblivious to anything in the twentieth century, even a spring-intoxicated niece and daughter down in her grandmother’s garden with a Pan from the woods; occasionally Rufus rattled a pot or a pan; but save for these few echoes of civilization, Adam and I delved and spaded and clipped and pruned and planted in the old garden just as if it had been the plot of ground without the walls of Eden in which our first parents were forced to get busy.

“Great work, Farmwoman,” said Adam as we sat down on the side steps to eat, bite-about, the huge red apple he had taken from the bundle of emigrant appearance which he always carried over his shoulder on the end of a long hickory stick and which I had by investigation at different times found to contain everything from clean linen to Sanskrit poetry for father.  To-day I found the manuscript score of a new opera by no less a person than Hurter himself, which he insisted on having me hum through with him while we ate the apple.

“I told Hurter I thought that fourth movement wouldn’t do, and now I know it after hearing you try it through an apple,” said Pan as he rose from beside me, tied the manuscript up in the bandana bundle, and picked up his long pruning-knife.  “Now, Woman, we’ll put a curb on the rambling of every last rambler in this garden and then we can lay out the rows for Bud to plant with the snap beans to-morrow.”  Adam, from the first day he had met me, had addressed me simply with my generic class name, and I had found it a good one to which to make answer.  Also Adam had shown me the profit and beauty of planting all needful vegetables mixed up with the flowers in the rich and loamy old garden, and had adjusted a cropping arrangement between the Corn-tassel Bud and me that was to be profitable to us both, Bud only doing in odd hours the work I couldn’t do, and getting a share of the profits.

“Don’t work me to death to-day,” I pleaded, and told him about the rescue of the babies Bird with so much dramatic force that his laughter rang out with such volume that old Rufus came to the kitchen window to look out and shake his head, and I knew he was muttering about “Peckerwoods,” “devils,” and the sixth day of the week.  “Will the chicks live all right, do you think?” I asked anxiously.