at leaving life—­and perhaps love, for I couldn’t help hearing in my mind’s ears that great dangerous racer bearing Matthew away from me at the rate of eighty miles an hour.  I was figuring on just how long it would take the five to eight hundred children of the Bird family, which I expected to incarnate themselves out of egg-shells, to increase to a flock of two thousand, from which, I was assured by the statistics in that very reliable book, I ought to make three thousand dollars a year, maybe five, with “good management.”  Also I was not at all worried about the “good management” to be employed.  I intended to begin to exert it the minute of my arrival in the township of Riverfield.  I had even already begun to use “thoughtful care,” for I had brought a box of tea biscuits along, and I felt a positive thrill of affection for Mr. G. Bird as he gratefully gobbled a crushed one from my hand.  Also it was dear of him the way he raised his proud head and chuckled to his brides in the crate behind him to come and get their share.  It was pathetic the way he called and called and they answered, until I finally stopped their mouths with ten other dainties, so that he could consume his in peace.  Even at that early stage of our friendship I liked the Golden Bird, and perhaps it was just a wave of prophetic psychology that made me feel so warmly towards the proud, white young animal who was to lead me to—­

So instead of the despair due the occasion, I was happy as I jogged slowly out over the twenty long miles that stretched out like a silvery ribbon dropped down upon the meadows and fields that separate the proud city of Hayesville and the gray and green little old hamlet of Riverfield, which nestles in a bend of the Cumberland River and sleeps time away under its huge old oak and elm and hackberry trees, kept perpetually green by the gnarled old cedars that throw blue-berried green fronds around their winter nakedness.  As we rode slowly along, with a leisure I am sure all the motor-car world has forgotten exists, the two old boys on the front seat hummed and chuckled happily while I breathed in great gulps of a large, meadow-sweet spring tang that seemed to fairly soak into the circulation of my heart.  The February day was cool with yet a kind of tender warmth in its little gust of Southern wind that made me feel as does that brand of very expensive Rhine wine which Albert at the Salemite on Forty-second Street in New York keeps for Gale Beacon specially, and which makes Gale so furious for you not to recognize, remember about, and comment upon at his really wonderful dinners to bright and shining lights in art and literature.  Returning from New York to the Riverfield Road through the Harpeth Valley, I also discovered upon the damsel Spring a hint of a soft young costume of young green and purple and yellow that was as yet just a mist being draped over her by the Southern wind.

“I feel like the fairy princess being driven into a land of enchantment, Mr. Golden Bird,” I remarked as I leaned back upon the soft old cushions and took in the first leisurely breath of the air of the open road that my lungs had ever inhaled:  one simply gulps air when seated in a motor-car.  “It is all so simple and easy and—­”