Baraboo weekly news. [volume] (Baraboo, Wis.) 1912-197?, 1913-01-16
CHAPTER III.
VISITORS.

wood,
Where the mavis and merle are sing
ing"
1t was on the third day of her exile
from South Court that Mrs. Ivert babe
! Phyllida after breakfast take up
basket of eggs for a setting to Mrs.
Allen. The girl, though longing to go,
demurred at first, whereupon her
mother exclaimed sharply, with some
reason:
"You are made up or contraries,
Phyllida. Nothing will hold you most
days, rain or shine, from going to
South Court, and now you cannot SO
much as leave a message at the back
door. No one will see you or speak
TO you but Mrs. Luckhurst, at the ut
most. can't have my best bantams'
eggs added for such vagaries."
So Phyllida started, nothing 10th,
with the basket on hex arm, up the
struggling picturesque street, all the
houses in it of different heights, an
giles, colors, and projections; over
the steep, pointed, one-arched bridge;
through fields skirting the high-road,
ending in cherry orchard opposite
Mrs. Aliens entrance gate.
1t was a perfect spring day, full of
the promise of all that is to follow
that gives to spring it's peculiar
charm; the sharp wind had vanished,
aud in it's stead warm breeze was
fNI hn h1ncCnn0C q G
if by magic, against a cloudless sky.
Phyllida stood still with a cry of de-
light and surprise as she entered the
orchard, at the blaze of white petals
undimmed by frost or dust. They
were all cherry trees except one white
hawthorn bush at the top of the slope
leading to the stile and the road
the very bush under which Mrs. AL
len had found Phyllida in her child
ish grief, and which the girl had
ever since regarded with a kind of
superstitious affection. For few
minutes she stood beside it, drinking
in the faint, sweet smell of the fruit
blossom and the general growth in
the air, listening to the tuneful chat
ter of the birds; then suddenly, put
ting down her basket, she danced
round and round it in the fulness of
her delight, singing, ooh, you beauti-
full, beautiful thing!" fit incarna-
ton, had any one been there to see
her, of spring itself, in her radiant,
unconscious beauty.
Having danced herself out of
breath and into a more sober mood,
half laughing herself to shame, she
took up her burden, tied on her hat,
and went her way.
It flashed upon her as she crossed
the road that it was her seventeenth
birthday.
Anniversaries were sternly ignored
at the Red House, so it touched her
the more to receive from the cook a
cake Mrs. Luckhurst had made for
her, with the intelligence that the old
gentleman had put them all about by
wanting dinner an hour earlier-a
broad hint to her to get out of the
way. Phyllida took it and walked
slowly up the slope again, resolving
to pick some punches of May to dec
crate her cake with. She was strug-
Cling with a tough branch, when she
heard a voice in the road behind her,
singing-a voice that certainly be-
longed to none of the choir who per-
formed Tate and Brady with local
variations, to the accompaniment OF a
bassoon, a clarionet, and two flddles
from the west gallery in church every
Sunday. 1t could not belong to Mrs.
Aliens visitor, who, Phyllida had de-
cided in her own mind, must be an
admiral at least, for it was a young,
fresh voice, singing a lively strain
She caught the words pretty sweet
ing" and lost the next bars sung ID
q lower voice (the performer was evil
IDENTIFY jumping over the stile). The
last two lines:
Journeys end in lovers meeting,
Every mothers son doth know"
were distinctly audible as he ad.
vanced, and startled Phyllida into
such haste to get out of the way with
her spoil, that she caught her skirt
on g bough and defeated her object.
"Hullo!" the singer ended abrupt
~. as he turned the screen of the
hawthorn bush, and beheId Phyllida
ewAG9E KIDNEYS are strenothenef