CHAPTER XXVII.

THE WINTER OF OUR CONTENT.

Boyd did not have the scarlet fever, nor did he return to school that year. It was especially good to have him home that winter for the weather was disagreeable and it would have been difficult for him to go back and forth. I know now those days must have been full of work and worry for me but as I look back upon them whatever of weariness and ugliness there was in the frugal life has disappeared and only the infinite beauty and sweetness of my life with my child, having him with me to teach and care for, remain. Like the rugged mountains which I saw from Lake Stevens. Near at hand I knew they must bear marks and scars of wear and tear among their granite boulders but from my bungalow they looked always beautiful wrapped in their white snow mantles or robed in a warmer garment of purple haze. So my days on the Lake Stevens' ranch only appear in my memory now as beautiful in their misty happiness.

Winter does not linger long on the Pacific Coast and summer presses closely on its retreating footsteps. February was a busy month for it meant house-cleaning

time and caring for many little chickens and getting down my boats to be repainted and repaired.

It was the year of the Alaska-Yukon Exposition at Seattle and many Easteners were coming to the Coast. I hardly dared move far from my exile ranch for fear of running into some one that knew me. More often now were being asked the questions:

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Who is Mrs. McIntyre?"

'Why does she stay so closely here and work so hard?"

Among the fishermen who came that April, 1909, was a vice-president of a large manufacturing firm who came out with a number of our friends for a day's fishing in Lake Stevens. He had been fishing at all the well known and most attractive fishing places from San Francisco up, and he went away with a fine string of Lake Stevens' trout. I was rather amazed, and I will own a wee bit nervous when I learned his home was in Cleveland, Ohio.

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Boyd's friend, William, had moved to a different mill town but he had a new chum named Bert, who was his able assistant in the "many inventions" only a boy knows how to play. They entirely rebuilt and improved the auto" and for many days they were the telephone men and had wires of an intricate system strung all over my side yard. They were both good little fishermen and enjoyed the boats to the very utmost. On rainy days they had offices in Boyd's shack and did a large

real estate and insurance business with a toy typewriter. This office is just as Boyd left it two years ago. They had a toy printing press and printed a little newspaper over which we had many a good laugh.

But at last mid-summer had arrived and the happy time came for Boyd to go with friends to the Seattle exposition. What he saw and learned while there did him more good than years of schooling. I shall never forget how much I enjoyed my first exposition, the "World's Fair" at Chicago, and I don't believe I shall ever enjoy another one as much. Boyd had now the same experience although he did go to the Buffalo exposition when a very small child. It was a lonesome time for me for I always felt as though I had lost some part of me when I was absent from my child. I think any reputable physician will say that when "The Mother Love" is very strong and predominates over every trait a woman has, it is sometimes very dangerous to take a child away from its mother. Unless a woman has a very strong mind she has sometimes been known to become insane through grief from the loss of her child. Poets love to sing of the sympathy of Nature and I think I would have died of lonesomeness while Boyd was gone if it had not been for the companionship of Nature during this time while he was away. At night I would light every lamp in my house and place the jolliest records I had upon my phonograph so passers-by would think I was having the merriest time

ever, instead of being a lonesome mother crying for her only child. But in the daytime my duties happily kept me out-of-doors most of the time. I needed no phonograph then, for was there not the

"Rustle of the leaves in summer's hush

When wandering breezes touch them and the sigh
That filters through the forest or the gush that
swells and sinks amid the branches high.
'Tis all the music of the wind and we let Fancy
float on the Aeolian breath."

The evergreen woods are a delightful promenade ground any time of the year with their clean pine needles under one's feet, the lovely ferns and Oregon grape and the birds overhead with their contented song, the little animals cutely disappearing at my sudden approach. It seems as though each needle in the pine trees is a different note when the light breezes are blowing. But in a gale the needles click against each other as if an untrained hand was striking several notes in discord at one time. Never shall I forget the sighing of the wind in "Coon's woods," so whenever my sorrows pressed so heavily upon me that even work was no solace I went for my favorite walk. For

"The woods were filled so full with song
There seemed no room for sense of wrong."

I went through my orchard gate into "Coon's Woods -the spicy pine odors, the fragrant balsam refreshed me, each leaf whispered to me, the birds sang for me,