4 THE COMING OF SPRING 



pie who come out to conquer the land by purchase 

 so often have only the one, the people born on the 

 soil the other. The native New Englander certainly 

 has a highly developed bump of curiosity, which 

 properly cultivated is neighborliness, but before it is 

 placed the right of the individual to privacy. 



Doubtless there were many things that the 

 hilltop folk desired to know concerning the old 

 man, whose forbears for two centuries had tilled 

 the soil that now lay a fallow waste of wild grass 

 and field flowers. The middle-aged remembered 

 his young wife, the daughter of the glen miller, 

 and their only child, a restless, questioning boy 

 who had disappeared short of forty years before, 

 some said with a peddler, others to go to the civil 

 war. Was he alive or dead? No one knew. Par- 

 cels were left at the cabin at rare intervals by the 

 carrier, and the old man had many little things 

 not of local origin, like his fishing rod and gun. 

 But his neighbors asked him no questions, and 

 he had remained a myth of the fifteen -mile circle 

 that swings around Tree -bridge, Lonetown, the 

 Glen and the Hollow. 



One day in middle April, after a winter so long 

 and cold that it had almost numbed even the 

 memory of growing things, Nell and I went out to 



