CHAPTER V.


Late hours did not agree with John Jay. Next morning he felt too tired
to stir. He groaned when he remembered that it was Sunday, for he
thought of the long, hot walk down to Brier Crook church. To his great
surprise, Mammy did not insist on his going with her: she had been
offered a seat in a neighbor's spring-wagon, and there was no room for
him.

So he spent a long, lazy morning, stretched out in the shade of the
apple-tree. A smell of clover and ripening orchards filled the heated
air. The hens clucked around drowsily with drooping wings. A warm breeze
stirred the grasses where he lay.

Ivy dug in the dirt with a broken spoon, while Bud kicked up his heels
beside John Jay, listening to a marvellous account of Miss Hallie's
party. It lost nothing in the telling. For years after, John Jay looked
back upon that night as a John of Patmos might have looked, remembering
some vision of the opened heavens. The lights, the music, the
white-robed figures, and above all, that wonderful fountain looking as
if it must have sprung from some "sea of glass mingled with fire," did
not belong to the earth with which he was acquainted. He repeated some
part of that recollection to Bud every day for a week, always ending
with the sentence uppermost in his thought: "And next Satiddy _I_ has a
buthday."