"What art?" I laughed.
"The art o' love!" he bawled as he rode off, slapping his thighs and setting the moonlit woods all a-ringing with his laughter.
CHAPTER VII
BEFORE THE STORM
Johnny Silver had ridden my mare to Varick's to be shod, the evening previous, and was to remain the night and return by noon to Fonda's Bush.
It was the first sunny May day of the year, murmurous with bees, and a sweet, warm smell from woods and cleared lands.
Already bluebirds were drifting from stump to stump, and robins, which had arrived in April before the snow melted, chirped in the furrows of last autumn's plowing.
Also were flying those frail little grass-green moths, earliest harbingers of vernal weather, so that observing folk, versed in the pretty signals which nature displays to acquaint us of her designs, might safely prophesy soft skies.
I was standing in my glebe just after sunrise, gazing across my great cleared field—I had but one then, all else being woods—and I was thinking about my crops, how that here should be sown buckwheat to break and mellow last year's sod; and here I should plant corn and Indian squashes, and yonder, God willing, potatoes and beans.