Chapter Twenty Three.
En Voyage for Bagdad.
Winter had passed and gone. It had fled far away to Norland hills, and spring reigned in its stead.
Sweet-voiced, hopeful spring! Spring, that is always so full of love and joy. Spring, with the balmy wind that whispers softly through the woods and groves, mingling its voice with the purling song of the brooklet and rill, sighing over fields of waving corn, and wooing the odours from a thousand wild flowers. Spring, with its chorus of joy-birds, whose melodies ring out from every woodland, every thicket and grove, till all the green earth seems to lift up its voice in a chorus of gladness and mirth. Sweet-voiced, hopeful spring, the poet’s one season of all the seasons of the year.
The old castle lawn was beautiful again, green with verdure and starred over with daisies, and out there now Lizzie and Tom were able to play and gambol once more, where Uncle Ben, with his cockatoo, and the Colonel used to sit there in their good straw chairs, smoke their pipes, and talk together of the days of auld lang syne.
Out on this lawn on one particularly blue skied sunny afternoon, Shireen and her friends were assembled, Warlock looking as wise as ever, Vee-Vee as gentle and loving, and Cracker, with his droll, rough, kindly face, all willing to please.
“Shireen,” said Cracker, “we haven’t heard you speak for a long time.”
Shireen paused in the middle of the operation of face-washing and sat on her mat for a moment or two, with her paw raised thoughtfully in front of her.
“You see,” she said at last, “it takes some time for grief like what I suffered for poor Emily to die away. Oh, mine isn’t gone even yet, and somehow I feel older since they took and buried my girl friend. But this is not going to prevent me from concluding my story, and I’m sure I ought to be glad to see you all around me on this lovely afternoon, and to know that we are all alive and well.”
“Let me see, where did I leave off in my story about my master and Beebee?”