CHAPTER XIV—WYOMING HOSPITALITY.
The March days came hurrying on—gray and wind-blown and showery—but rather merry for all that. All signs bore tokens of an early spring. A flock of geese had already gone over, crows were flapping across St. Helen’s snow-freed meadow, and robins and song-sparrows felt quite at home. There was a misty, indistinct blur in the tops of the maple trees, quite as though wet buds were swelling. Under the pine trees by the Retreat, tiny, furry heads were peeping above the needles, hepaticas just awakening. The waters of the brook, freed from ice, tore boisterously through the meadow; and along its weedy edges the water-rats, having left their tunnels in the banks, scurried on secret, silent errands. Everywhere there was a strange fragrance of freshly-washed things—soft brown earth, buds ready to burst, tender shoots of plants. Yes, spring was unmistakably near, and the St. Helen’s girls were ready for its coming.
It was on a Saturday afternoon, the last in March, that Virginia walked alone down the hill, through the pine woods, and across the road to the pastures and woodlands opposite. She would have loved company, but Priscilla, Lucile, and the Blackmore twins were playing tennis finals in the gym, the Seniors were enjoying an afternoon tea, Vivian was nowhere to be found, and, in the hope of persuading Dorothy to go with her, she had again interrupted a secret conference between Dorothy and Imogene, which conferences, to the watchful and troubled Vigilantes, were becoming more and more frequent. The whole campus seemed deserted, she thought, as she started from The Hermitage. Perhaps, the opening of the “Forget-me-not” soda fountain—another sign of spring—accounted for that.
It was wet underfoot and gray overhead, but she did not mind. She was bound for the pastures on the other side of the road leading to Hillcrest, for there Miss Wallace had said she might even this early find the mayflowers of which her mother had so often told her. As she went along, jumping over the little spring brooks and pools in the hollows, she thought of how spring was also coming to her own dear country. Her father’s letter that morning had told her of budding quaking-asps, of red catkins on the cottonwoods, of green foot-hills, and of tiny yellow butter-cups and the little lavender pasque-flowers, which came first of all the spring blossoms. In a few weeks more those foot-hills would be gay with violets and spring beauties, anemones and shooting-stars.
She crawled between the gray, moss-covered bars of a fence which separated the two pastures, and went toward some deeper woodland where pines and firs grew. Here, Miss Wallace said, she would be likely to find them. She looked sharply for brown, clustered leaves, which always deceived one as to the wealth beneath them. At last on a little mossy knoll, in a clearing among the pines, she found what she sought. Kneeling eagerly on the damp ground, she searched with careful fingers through the brown leaves. Green leaves revealed themselves. She smelled the sweetest fragrance imaginable—the fragrance of flowers and brown earth and fresh leaves all in one. She looked beneath the green leaves; and there, with their pale pink faces almost buried in the moss, she found the first mayflowers of the spring.
Tenderly she raised the tendrils from the moss and grass, and examined the tiny blossoms, in whose centers the hoar frost of winter seemed to linger. These then were the flowers her New England mother had so loved. Years before, perhaps in this very spot, her mother had come to search for them. She almost hated to pluck them—they looked so cozy lying there against the brown earth, but she wanted to send them to her grandmother for her mother’s birthday. On other knolls and around the gray pasture rocks, even at the foot of the fir trees, she found more buds and a few opened blossoms. Her mother had long ago taught her Whittier’s “Song to the Mayflowers,” and she said some of the verses which she still remembered, as she sat beneath the trees, and pulled away the dead leaves from the flowers’ trailing stems.
“O sacred flowers of faith and hope,
As sweetly now as then
Ye bloom on many a birchen slope,
In many a pine dark glen.