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Updated: June 6, 2025
I came out to look for pussy-willows, not for Robby-will-you's!" With which piece of audacity she dismissed the subject.
It had a brown coat and a red breast. As they watched, it began to sing. Its song seemed to say: "I was once the chief's son. But now I am a bird. I am happier than if I had lived to be a fierce warrior, with scalps at my belt. Now I shall make all glad with my song. I shall tell the little children when spring has come. Then they will search for pussy-willows and anemones.
A green poster board, on which were tied bunches of pussy-willows, among whose twigs were perched some of the common birds around Evanston, was used. The plates used were the nature study bird plates, brightly colored, which were cut out and pasted on the board in such a way that the effect was very lifelike.
Sylvia, who always enjoyed prodigiously both in anticipation and in reality any social event, could scarcely contain herself as the time drew near with every prospect of fair weather. The morning of the day was clear and fine, a perfect example of early spring, with silvery pearls showing on the tips of the red-twig osiers, and pussy-willows gleaming gray along the margins of swampy places.
I reached the old home under the hill, delighted to see once more the eyes which looked love to eyes that spoke again, to hear the familiar spring chorus from the river, the first robins and bluebirds rejoicing over the resurrection of nature, to explore each sheltered nook for the early cowslips, violets, pussy-willows, dandelions, and crocuses; to gossip with my old friends the chipmunks, the muskrats, and the woodchucks; to revisit each mossy hollow and sequestered retreat in my much loved pine woods; to whittle again the willow whistles, to caress the opening buds and tiny green growing blades of grass; to float once more in my little boat under the embracing arms of my chums, the oaks, birches, and hemlocks I loved so well; to watch the first flight of Psyche, the butterfly, so emblematic of the soaring of the immortal soul from the body dead.
Sometimes they have sprays of arbutus in their buttonholes, or bunches of hepatica. The partridge is drumming in the woods, and the woodpeckers are drumming on dry limbs. The day is veiled, but we catch such glimpses through the veil. The bees are getting pollen from the pussy-willows and soft maples, and the first honey from the arbutus.
The children had brought home a branch of pussy-willows, and as Marise and Neale stood for a moment at the open door breathing in the new softness, they saw Touclé, old and stooped and shabby, her reticule bag bulging, her flat feet in enormous overshoes plodding up the road towards the mountain. They smiled at one another. It was in truth the first day of spring.
Close to the road, where the fence angle allows for a deep bed and the lilacs grade from the tall white of the height of trees down to the compact bushes of newer French varieties, lies the violet bed, now a mass of green leaves only, but by these Aunt Lavinia's eye read them out and found here the English sweet wild violet, as well as the deep purple double garden variety, the tiny white scented that comes with pussy-willows, the great single pansy violet of California, and the violets grown from the Russian steppes that carpeted the ground under your "mother tree."
Then gray willow buds put forth woolly little pussy-willows, which seemed fairly bursting, like fat round kittens. They grew bigger and bigger, rounder and rounder, till at last they really did burst, and plumped great rosy-cheeked apples into the lap of the Saint, who held up the skirt of his gray gown to catch them as they fell.
She often tried to remember the stork, his broad nest of pussy-willows on the chin of the new moon, and the long trip down through the wind and snow to the open window of the farm-house. But though she never forgot her christening, and could even remember things that happened before that, her wonderful journey, she found, had slipped entirely from her mind.
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