The Project Gutenberg eBook, Clover, by Susan Coolidge, Illustrated by Jessie McDermot

Title: Clover

Author: Susan Coolidge

Release Date: May 8, 2005 [eBook #15798]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CLOVER***

E-text prepared by Rose Koven, Juliet Sutherland,
and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
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Clover

By

Susan Coolidge

Author of "What Katy Did," "Mischief's Thanksgiving," "Nine Little Goslings," etc.

ILLUSTRATED BY JESSIE McDERMOT

Boston
Little, Brown, and Company

1907

Alfred Mudge & Son, Inc., Printers,

Boston, Mass., U.S.A.

CLOVER.

CHAPTER I.

A TALK ON THE DOORSTEPS.

t 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 indefinable odors from half-developed leaf-buds and cherry and pear blossoms. The wisterias overhead were thickly starred with pointed pearl-colored sacs, growing purpler with each hour, which would be flowers before long; the hedges were quickening into life, the long pensile 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 the parlor windows.

Katy and Clover Carr, sitting with their sewing on the door-steps, drew in with every breath the sense of spring. Who does not know the delightfulness of that first sitting out of doors after a long winter's confinement It seems like flinging the gauntlet down to the powers of cold. Hope and renovation are in the air. Life has conquered Death, and to the happy hearts in love with life there is joy in the victory. The two sisters talked busily as they sewed, but all the time an only half-conscious rapture informed their senses,—the sympathy of that which is immortal in human souls with the resurrection of natural things, which is the sure pledge of immortality.