Once More, From the Beginning by Wendy Bertsch

The path led after a while to a more open country, there was a low hill to be climbed, and at its top the slender figure stopped and seemed to be panting for breath.

The child seemed to be asleep it looked too heavy for so slight a woman to carry. She stopped sometimes to rest, and walked more and more wearily, with increasing effort but she kept on her way desperately, as if it would not do to arrive much later at the place which she was seeking. She seemed sure of her way, and kept the path without difficulty, though a stranger might easily have lost it here and there, where it led among the patches of sweet-fern or bayberry bushes, or through shadowy tracts of small white-pines. The dense and early darkness which usually follows such unseasonable mildness had already begun to cut short the pleasures of this spring-like day, when a young woman, who carried a child in her arms, turned from a main road of Oldfields into a foot-path which led southward across the fields and pastures. It seemed like a reprieve from the doom of winter, or from even November itself.

The afternoon was like spring, the air was soft and damp, and the buds of the willows had been beguiled into swelling a little, so that there was a bloom over them, and the grass looked as if it had been growing green of late instead of fading steadily. It had been one of the warm and almost sultry days which sometimes come in November a maligned month, which is really an epitome of the other eleven, or a sort of index to the whole year's changes of storm and sunshine. Produced by Suzanne Shell, Wendy Bertsch and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at A COUNTRY DOCTOR

Once More, From the Beginning by Wendy Bertsch