"proud and sweet," when the humblest imagination could have pictured
Aurora and her train in the jocund clouds that trooped along the
sky,--wind-built processions which the wind dispersed. Wild flowers spread
so fast they might have been spilled from the rainbow scarf of Iris
fleeting overhead. The river was in flood, digging its elbows into its
muddy banks. The willow and wild-rose thickets stooped and washed their
spring garments in its tide.

Primeval life and love were all around them. Meadow larks flung their
brief jets of song into the sunlight; the copses rustled with wings;
wood-doves cooed from the warm sunny hollows, and the soft booming of
their throaty call was like a beating in the air,--the pulse of spring.
They had found their Garden. Humanity in the valley passed before them in
forms as interesting and as alien as the brother beasts to Adam: the
handsome driver of the jerky, Joe Stratton's successor, who sat at dinner
opposite and combed his flowing mustache with his fork in a lazy,
dandified way; the darkened faces of sheep-herders enameled by sun and
wind, their hair like the winter coats of animals; the slow-eyed farmers
with the appetites of horses; the spring recruits for the ranks of labor
footing it to distant ranches, each with his back-load of bedding, and the
dust of three counties on his garments.

The sweet forces of Nature shut out, for a season, Paul's _cri du coeur_.
One may keep a chamber sacred to one's sadder obligations and yet the
house be filled with joy. Further ramifications of the search were mapped
out with Jimmy's indifferent assistance. For good reasons of his own,
Jimmy did little to encourage an early start. He would explain that his
maps were of ancient date and full of misinformation as to stage routes.
"See that now! The stages was pulled off that line five year ago, on
account of the railroad cuttin' in on them. Ye couldn't make it wid'out ye