“Good morning, Daytime!” A girl stood upon the gray stone steps of a Lenox mansion and, looking up, answered the first lovely smile that young day flung down to her as, robed in pale pink and bluish bloom, it slowly climbed the eastern sky.
“Good morning, Day-sky!” she laughed again—smiling all over in response to that pink of beauty above her. “Well! this is the first time that the Sunrise and I have been chums,” she murmured to herself, “the first spring, I mean; I—I who used to suffer from the sleepy fevers more than—than the ‘nappiest’ little flower in my garden.”
She laughed softly now, Una Grosvenor, known to her girl chums as Jack—a gay bit of satire, by the way—and by the Council Fire as U-te-yan, Flower, as she descended the gray steps into a dewy garden, where those Rogues O’May, the late spring flowers, were still, many of them, slumbering with eyes tight shut.
“Yes, you gain an hour by the daylight saving—or you think you do, you sluggards!” she flung at them, a slight nearsighted peculiarity in her dark eye flashing with pretty mockery. “Six o’clock, now, by my watch—really only five—and there you are: chicory, tulip, wild rose, pond lily, fast asleep still; poppy, marigold, daisy—and wild dandelion, only just awaking—and one little belated Crocus, just one, dozing, too!”
It was with a smile, roguish and tender, tender as that of the dawn, that Una stood still, cooling her toes in the dew, to look at her garden—with its cheek, silver and pink as a baby’s, reflecting the flush of the sky.
A large, old-fashioned garden it was and full of surprises, inclosing U-te-yan’s blooming beds where, as a Camp Fire Girl, she had sown or planted, experimented and transplanted herself; and it was plain from the look upon her face that she lived in it—dreamed in it, as a princess might live in a fairy tale.
“My flowers!” She dimpled imaginatively. “Oh-h! at this hour, I can almost hear them singing to me. What is it—they—say? I made it up, for them, before:
“Good morning, dear Una! Good morning, dear Day!
The gloom of the night clouds has all flown away,
We kick off our blankets of mist, soft and white,