The birds are reappearing and an enterprising family of wrens are already building urgently over my window. Robins are courting and strutting. The trees are tender with leaf and the throb of spring is in the air like a mighty force, ceaseless, slow, careless, yet all-penetrating. The morning sun was bathing all the world in the very elixir of youth. A fly was buzzing madly against the pane. I felt intensely solitary, poignantly alone.
The Valdarfer Boccaccio lay opened on my desk—but he was four and a half centuries removed from this sunlight. I almost hated it—hated all the beloved objects about me. My precious books were dumb, inert, a clog upon all the senses. With a heart passionately hungry I craved for youth, freshness, activity. I seized the Valdarfer Boccaccio as though to hurl it from me. Then, restraining myself, I brought it down on the table with a bang that nearly shattered its precious binding. I laughed ruefully. I determined on a sudden to greet the spring for myself.
Griselda came bustling as she heard me rattling the canes in the jar.
"You're going out?" she demanded.
"Yes, Griselda." I am always a little apologetic with Griselda, for did she not know me as a boy? It is a part of the instinctive clutching at youth that makes us respect our elders. That puts them at once in their own elderly world. Besides, Griselda is always in the right.
"Then why did ye not go with the bairns?"
"They didn't want anybody with them," and I winked Spartan-wise—I can wink at Griselda. Has she not spent her life serving me? In this rare world you can do anything to people who love you enough.
"Havers!" muttered Griselda, with an enigmatic toss of her old head. "Then see that ye take your light coat."
"A coat to-day?" I protested.
"Aye—a coat to-day, young man!"