No wonder this spruce grew so tall and strong.

How cold it must keep the old fellow's toes." "What queer ideas you have, John." She had not yet the gift of fancy, long denied to some in the emergent years of approaching womanhood.

"I am tired, John," she said, as she dropped with hands clasped behind her head and hidden in the glorious abundance of darkening red hair, which lay around her on the brown pine-needles like the disordered aureole of some careless-minded saint.
John said, "It is this terrible heat.

I never before heard you complain of being tired." "Oh, it's just nice tired." She lay still, comfortable, with open eyes staring up at the intense blue of the September sky seen through the wide-east limbs of pine and spruce.

The little rill, scarce a finger thickness of water, crawled out lazily between the roots and trickled away.