Clover Large Print

It was one of those afternoons in late April which are as mild and balmy as any June day.The air was full of the chirps and twitters of nest-building birds, and of sweet indefinableodors from half-developed leaf-buds and cherry and pear blossoms. The wisteriasoverhead were thickly starred with pointed pearl-colored sacs, growing purpler with eachhour, which would be flowers before long; the hedges were quickening into life, the longpensile willow-boughs and the honey-locusts hung in a mist of fine green against the sky,and delicious smells came with every puff of wind from the bed of white violets under theparlor windows.Katy and Clover Carr, sitting with their sewing on the door-steps, drew in with everybreath the sense of spring. Who does not know the delightfulness of that first sitting out ofdoors after a long winter's confinement? It seems like flinging the gauntlet down to thepowers of cold. Hope and renovation are in the air. Life has conquered Death, and to thehappy hearts in love with life there is joy in the victory. The two sisters talked busily asthey sewed, but all the time an only half-conscious rapture informed their senses,--thesympathy of that which is immortal in human souls with the resurrection of natural things,which is the sure pledge of immortality.