1902. The book begins: It was a perfect day of the kind that Mr. Lowell has celebrated in song-a day in June. It was, moreover, a day glorified even beyond Mr. Lowell's imagining, by the incomparable climate of southside Virginia. A young man of perhaps seven and twenty, came walking with vigor down the narrow roadway, swinging a stick which he had paused by the wayside to cut. The road ran at this point through a luxuriantly growing woodland, with borders of tangled undergrowth and flowers on either side, and with an orchestra of bird performers all around.