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ROADS TO CHILDHOOD

dren of many races. Little brothers and sisters three, four, and five years old had come with big boys and girls eight, ten, and twelve years old to listen to the stories and poetry with which we were accustomed to celebrate the day and the coming of spring

When afther the Winter alarmin’
The Spring steps in so charmin’
So smilin’ an’ arch
In the middle o’ March
With her hand St. Patrick’s arm on!

The verse always heralded the day, taking its place beside an old print of St. Patrick. On the table below, books were opened up and shamrocks grew beside the flowers so often mentioned in stories and poems of springtime—daffodils, the narcissus poetica, a crocus, a violet, or an hepatica nursed into early bloom by an old English gardener, whose cobbler’s shop led into a greenhouse. This gardener, for he was a cobbler only by circumstance, “ran away from the shoes” when a lad of

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