its deeps, which, rising to a man’s nostrils, stirs and thrills him because it is the scent of life’s self.  The bird upon the sapling was a robin, the tiny round body perched upon his delicate legs, plump and bright plumaged for mating.  He touched his warm red breast with his beak, fluffed out and shook his feathers, and, swelling his throat, poured forth his small, entranced song.  It was a gay, brief, jaunty thing, but pure, joyous, gallant, liquid melody.  There was dainty bravado in it, saucy demand and allurement.  It was addressed to some invisible hearer of the tender sex, and wheresoever she might be hidden—­whether in great branch or low thicket or hedge—­there was hinted no doubt in her small wooer’s note that she would hear it and in due time respond.  Mount Dunstan, listening, even laughed at its confident music.  The tiny thing uttering its Call of the World—­jubilant in the surety of answer!

Having flung it forth, he paused a moment and waited, his small head turned sideways, his big, round, dew-bright black eye roguishly attentive.  Then with more swelling of the throat he trilled and rippled gayly anew, undisturbed and undoubting, but with a trifle of insistence.  Then he listened, tried again two or three times, with brave chirps and exultant little roulades.  “Here am I, the bright-breasted, the liquid-eyed, the slender-legged, the joyous and conquering!  Listen to me—­listen to me.  Listen and answer in the call of God’s world.”  It was the joy and triumphant faith in the tiny note of the tiny thing—­Life as he himself was, though Life whose mystery his man’s hand could have crushed—­which, while he laughed, set Mount Dunstan thinking.  Spring warmth and spring scents and spring notes set a man’s being in tune with infinite things.

The bright roulade began again, prolonged itself with renewed effort, rose to its height, and ended.  From a bush in the thicket farther up the road a liquid answer came.  And Mount Dunstan’s laugh at the sound of it was echoed by another which came apparently from the bank rising from the road on the other side of the hedge, and accompanying the laugh was a good-natured nasal voice.

“She’s caught on.  There’s no mistake about that.  I guess it’s time for you to hustle, Mr. Rob.”

Mount Dunstan laughed again.  Jem Salter had heard voices like it, and cheerful slang phrases of the same order in his ranch days.  On the other side of his park fence there was evidently sitting, through some odd chance, an American of the cheery, casual order, not sufficiently polished by travel to have lost his picturesque national characteristics.

Mount Dunstan put a hand on a broken panel of fence and leaped over into the road.

A bicycle was lying upon the roadside grass, and on the bank, looking as though he had been sheltering himself under the hedge from the rain, sat a young man in a cheap bicycling suit.  His features were sharply cut and keen, his cap was pushed back from his forehead, and he had a pair of shrewdly careless boyish eyes.