The Little Lady of the Big House

court, began to come sounds of the awakening of the girl who laughed from the wooden frame by his bed and who had left on th

wing that was hers. And he heard her singing in the patio garden, where, also, she desisted long enough to quarrel with her Airedale

staled. Always, up himself for hours, he had a sense that the Big House

usual, forgot her in his own affairs. She went out of his consciousn

as her arm passed around his neck and she perched, half in his arms, on one accommodating knee of his. And he pressed her, and advertised his awareness of her existence an

Here is your Lady Boy, your 'little haughty moon,' and you haven't even

s inoculations, pressed his wife closer, kissed her, but with insisten

sperity of her night since the boudoir cap had been left upon his sleeping porch. He shut the pamphlet on

ried. "Oh!

ail. She quivered against him with the

are breaking

spring," P

that good weat

d l

own this morning for the kidding. You should have seen them. And the wild canaries have been discussing matrimony in the patio for hours. I think some free lover is trying

ddenly, with the abruptness of the trump of doom, all the microphonic chorus of the tiny golden lovers was swept away, obliterated, in a Gargan

en of the sleeping porch to the road through the lilacs, while they waited breathlessly for the great

ys. The mares hear me, and startle, in quiet pastures; for they know me. The grass grows rich and richer, the land is filled with fatness, and the sap is in the trees. It is the spring. The spring is mine. I am monarch of my

ive vision of Mountain Lad, majestic and mighty, the gnat-creature of a man upon his back absurdly small; his eyes wild and desirous, with the blue sheen that surfaces the eyes of stallion

afar off, came a thin-

gton Princess," Pau

trumpeted his cal

Eros! I stamp u

knew resentment of her husband's admiration for the splendid beast. And the next

ced half absently to her from the pamphlet folded on h

come down

hort acorns i

long acorns

black-oak acorn,

ss movement of the hand that held the finger-marked hog-pamphlet and caught the swift though involuntary flash of his eye to the clock on hi

e planting. And, sometimes, almost you are to me the ultramodern man, the last word of the two-legged, male human that finds Trojan adventures in sieges of statistics, and, armed wi

ing her still closer. "That I am a silly scientific brute who doesn't merit his 'vain li

of warning, and, both heads turning as one they saw Bonbright, the as

ake is confident that two of them are very important.

r feet, could feel him slipping from her toward his tables of st

ugh the doorway; "I've christened the last boy--

f forlornness that vanished w

and drakes with the

he assured her with a solemnity belied

you'll have to be calling them Oh Bel, Oh Hell, and Oh Go to Hell. Your 'Oh' was a mistake. You should have started w

undred and fifty dollars each, F. O. B., of three hundred registered yearling bulls to the beef ranges of Chile. Even so, vaguely, with vague pleasure, he