IV

[pg 083]IVAfter FrostIt is late afternoon in mid-September. I stand in my garden sniffing the raw air, and wondering, as always at this season,willthere be frost to-night or will there not? Of course if I were a woodchuck or a muskrat, or any other really intelligent creature, I should know at once and act accordingly, but being only a stupid human being, I am thrown back on conjecture, assisted by the thermometer, and an appeal to Jonathan.“Too much wind for frost,”says he.“Sure? I’d hate to lose my nasturtiums quite so early.”“You won’t lose ’em. Look at the thermometer if you don’t believe me. If it’s above forty you’re safe.”I look, and try to feel reassured. But I am not quite easy in my mind until next morning when, running out before breakfast, I make the rounds and find everything untouched.[pg 084]But a few days later the alarm comes again. There is no wind this time, and, what is worse, an ominous silence falls at dusk over the orchard and meadow.“Why is everything so still?”I ask myself.“Oh, of course—the katydids aren’t talking—and the crickets, and all the other whirr-y things. Ah! That means business! My poor garden!”“Jonathan!”I call, as I feel rather than see his shape whirling noiselessly in at the big gate after his ride up from the station.“Help me cover my nasturtiums. There’ll be frost to-night.”“Maybe,”says Jonathan’s voice.“Not maybe at all—surely. Listen to the katydids!”“You mean, listen to the absence of katydids.”“Very well. The point is, I want newspapers.”“No. The point is, I am to bring newspapers.”“Exactly.”“And tuck up your nasturtiums for the night in your peculiarly ridiculous fashion—”[pg 085]“I know it looks ridiculous, but really it’s sensible. There may be weeks of summer after this.”And so the nasturtiums are tucked up, cozily hidden under the big layers of sheets, whose corners we fasten down with stones. To be sure, the gardenisrather a funny sight, with these pale shapes sprawling over its beds. But it pays. For in the morning, though over in the vegetable garden the squash leaves and lima beans are blackened and limp, my nasturtiums are still pert and crisp. I pull off the papers, wondering what the passers-by have thought, and lo! my gay garden, good for perhaps two weeks more!But a day arrives when even newspaper coddling is of no avail. Sometimes it is in late September, sometimes not until October, but when it comes there is no resisting.The sun goes down, leaving a clear sky paling to green at the horizon. A still cold falls upon the world, and I feel that it is the end. Shears in hand, I cut everything I can—nasturtiums down to the ground,—leaves, buds, and all,—feathery sprays of cosmos, asters by the armful. Those last[pg 086]bouquets that I bring into the house are always the most beautiful, for I do not have to save buds for later cutting. There will, alas, be no later cutting.So I fill my bowls and vases, and next morning I go out, well knowing what I shall see. It is a beautiful sight, too, if one can forget its meaning. The whole golden-green world of autumn has been touched with silver. In the low-lying swamp beyond the orchard it is almost like a light snowfall. The meadows rising beyond the barns are silvered over wherever the long tree-shadows still lie. And in my garden, too, where the shadows linger, every leaf is frosted, but as soon as the sun warms them through, leaf and twig turn dark and droop to the ground. It is the end.Except, indeed, for my brave marigolds and calendulas and little button asters. It is for this reason that I have given them space all summer, nipping them back when they tried to blossom early, for they seem a bit crude compared with the other flowers. But now that frost is here, my feelings warm to them. I cannot criticize their color and texture,[pg 087]so grateful am I to them for not giving up. And when last night’s cuttings have faded, I shall be very glad of a glowing mass of marigold beside my fireplace, and of the yellow stars of calendula, like embodied sunshine, on my dining-table.Well, then, the frost has come! And after the first pang of realization, I find that, curiously enough, the worst is over. Since it has come, let it come! And now—hurrah for the garden house-cleaning! The garden is dead—the garden of yesterday! Long live the garden—the garden of to-morrow! For suddenly my mind has leaped ahead to spring.I can hardly wait for breakfast to be over, before I am out in working clothes, pulling up things—not weeds now, but flowers, or what were flowers. Nasturtiums, asters, cosmos, snapdragon, stock, late-blooming cornflowers—up they all come, all the annuals, and the biennials that have had their season. I fling them together in piles, and soon have small haystacks all along my grass paths, and—there I am! Down again to the good brown earth!It is with positive satisfaction that I stand[pg 088]and survey my beds, great bare patches of earth, glorified here and there by low clumps of calendula and great bushes of marigold. Now, then! I can do anything! I can dig, and fertilize, and transplant. Best of all, I can plan and plan! The crisp wind stings my cheeks, but as I work I feel the sun hot on the back of my neck. I get the smell of the earth as I turn it over, mingled with the pungent tang of marigold blossoms, very pleasant out of doors, though almost too strong for the house except near a fireplace. I believe the most characteristic fall odors are to me this of marigold, mingled with the fragrance of apples piled in the orchard, the good smell of earth newly turned up, and the flavor of burning leaves, borne now and then on the wind, from the outdoor house-cleaning of the world.There is perhaps no season of all the garden year that brings more real delight to the gardener, no time so stimulating to the imagination. This year in the garden has been good, but next year shall be better. All the failures, or near-failures, shall of course be turned into successes, and the successes shall[pg 089]be bettered. Last year there were not quite enough hollyhocks, but next year there shall be such glories! There are seedlings that I have been saving, over on the edge of the phlox. I dash across to look them up—yes, here they are, splendid little fellows, leaves only a bit crumpled by the frost. I dig them up carefully, keeping earth packed about their roots, and one by one I convey them across and set them out in a beautiful row where I want them to grow next year. Their place is beside the old stone-flagged path, and I picture them rising tall against the side of the woodshed, whose barrenness I have besides more than half covered with honeysuckle.Then, there are my foxgloves. Some of them I have already transplanted, but not all. There is a little corner full of stocky yearlings that I must change now. And that same corner can be used for poppies. I have kept seeds of this year’s poppies—funny little brown pepper-shakers, with tiny holes at the end through which I shake out the fine seed dust. Doubtless they would attend to all this without my help, but I like to be sure[pg 090]that even my self-seeding annuals come up where I most want them.Biennials, like the foxglove and canterbury bells, are of course, the difficult children of the garden, because you have to plan not only for next year but for the year after. Next year’s bloom is secured—unless they winter-kill—in this year’s young plants, growing since spring, or even since the fall before. These I transplant for next summer’s beauty. But for the year after I like to take double precautions. Already I have tiny seedlings, started since August, but besides these I sow seed, too late to start before spring. For a severe winter may do havoc, and I shall then need the early start given by fall sowing.As I work on, I discover all sorts of treasures—young plants, seedlings from all the big-folk of my garden. Young larkspurs surround the bushy parent clumps, and the ground near the forget-me-nots is fairly carpeted with little new ones. I have found that, though the old forget-me-nots will live through, it pays to pull out the most ragged of them and trust to the youngsters to fill[pg 091]their places. These, and English daisies, I let grow together about as they will. They are pretty together, with their mingling of pink, white, and blue, they never run out, and all I need is to keep them from spreading too far, or from crowding each other too much.When my back aches from this kind of sorting and shifting, I straighten up and look about me again. Ah! The phlox! Time now to attend to that!My white phlox is really the most distinguished thing in my garden. I have pink and lavender, too, but any one can have pink and lavender by ordering them from a florist. They can have white, too, but not my white. For mine never saw a florist; it is an inheritance.Sixty or seventy years ago there was a beautiful little garden north of the old house tended and loved by a beautiful lady. The lady died, and the garden did not long outlive her. Its place was taken by a crab-apple orchard, which flourished, bore blossom and fruit, until in its turn it grew old, while the garden had faded to a dim tradition. But one day in August, a few years ago, I discovered[pg 092]under the shade of an old crab tree, two slender sprays of white phlox, trying to blossom. In memory of that old garden and its lady, I took them up and cherished them. And the miracle of life was again made manifest. For from those two little half-starved roots has come the most splendid part of my garden. All summer it makes a thick green wall on the garden’s edge, beside the flagged path. In the other beds it rises in luxuriant masses, giving background and body with its wonderful deep green foliage, which is greener and thicker than any other phlox I know. And when its season to bloom arrives—a long month, from early August to mid-September—it is a glory of whiteness, the tallest sprays on a level with my eyes, the shortest shoulder high, except when rain weighs down the heavy heads and they lean across the paths barring my passage with their fragrant wetness.Here and there I have let the pink and lavender phlox come in, for they begin to bloom two weeks earlier, when the garden needs color. But always my white must dominate. And it does. Most wonderful of[pg 093]all is it on moonlight nights of late August, when it broods over the garden like a white cloud, and the night moths come crowding to its fragrant feast, with their intermittent burring of furry wings.Ah, well! the phlox has passed now, and its trim green leaves are brown and crackly. I can do what I like with it after this. So when my other transplanting grows tiresome, I fall upon my phlox. Every year some of it needs thinning, so quickly does it spread. I take the spading-fork, and, with what seems like utter ruthlessness, I pry out from the thickest centers enough good roots to give the rest breathing and growing space. Along the path edges I always have to cut out encroaching roots each year, or else soon there would be no path. But all that I take out is precious, either to give to friends for their gardens, or to enlarge the edges of my own. For this phlox needs almost no care, and will fight grass and weeds for itself.There are phlox seedlings, too, all over the garden, but I have no way of telling what color they are, though usually I can detect the white by its foliage. I take them up and set[pg 094]them out near the main phlox masses, and wait for the next season’s blossoming before I give them their final place.This is the time of year, too, when I give some attention to the rocks in my garden. Of course, in order to have a garden at all, it was necessary to take out enough rock to build quite a respectable stone wall. But that was not the end. There never will be an end. A Connecticut garden grows rocks like weeds, and one must expect to keep on taking them out each fall. The rest of the year I try to ignore them, but after frost I like to make a fresh raid, and get rid of another wheelbarrow load or so. And I always notice that for one barrow load of stones that go out, it takes at least two barrow loads of earth to fill in. Thus an excellent circulation is maintained, and the garden does not stagnate. Moreover, I take great pleasure in showing my friends—especially friends from the more earthy sections of New York and farther west—the piles of rock and the parts of certain stone walls about the place that have been literally made out of the cullings of my garden. They never believe me.[pg 095]As I am thus occupied,—digging, planting, thinning, sowing,—I find it one of the happiest seasons of the year. It is partly the stimulus of the autumn air, partly the pleasure of getting at the ground. I think there are some of us, city folk though we be, who must have the giant Antæus for ancestor. We still need to get in close touch with the earth now and then. Children have a true instinct with their love of barefoot play in the dirt, and there are grown folks who still love it—but we call it gardening. The sight and the feel and the smell of my brown garden beds gives me a pleasure that is very deep and probably very primitive.But there is another source of pleasure in my fall gardening—a pleasure not of the senses but of the imagination.For as I do my work my fancy is active. As I transplant my young hollyhocks, I see them, not little round-leaved bunches in my hand, but tall and stately, aflare with colors—yellows, whites, pinks. As I dig about my larkspur and stake out its seedlings, they spire above me in heavenly blues. As I arrange the clumps of coarse-leaved young[pg 096]foxgloves, I seem to see their rich tower-like clusters of old-pink bells bending always a little towards the southeast, where most sun comes from. As I thin my forget-me-not I see it—in my mind’s eye—in a blue mist of spring bloom. Thus, a garden rises in my fancy, a garden where neither beetle, borer, nor cutworm doth corrupt, and where the mole doth not break in or steal, where gentle rain and blessed sun come as they are needed, where all the flowers bloom unceasingly in colors of heavenly light—a garden such as never yet existed nor ever shall, till the tales of fairyland come true. I shall never see that garden, yet every year it blooms for me afresh—after frost.[pg 097]VThe Joys of Garden StewardshipI sometimes think I am coming to classify my friends according to the way they act when I talk about my garden. On this basis, there are three sorts of people.First there are those who are obviously not interested. Such as these feel no answering thrill, even at the sight of a florist’s spring catalogue. A weed inspires in them no desire to pull it. They may, however, be really nice people if they are still young; for, except by special grace, no one under thirty need be expected to care about gardens—it is a mature taste. But in the mean time I turn our talk in other channels.Then there are the people who, when I approach the subject, brighten up, look intelligent, even eager, but in a moment make it clear that what they are eager for is a chance to talk about their own gardens. Mine is merely the stepping-stone, the bridge,[pg 098]the handle. This is better than indifference, yet it is sometimes trying. One of my dearest friends thus tests my love now and then when she walks in my garden.“Aren’t those peonies lovely?”I suggest.“Yes,”dreamily;“you know I can’t have that shade in my garden because—”and she trails off into a disquisition that I could, just at that moment, do without.“Look at the height of that larkspur!”I say.“Yes—but, you know, it wouldn’t do for me to have larkspur when I go away so early. What I need is things for April and May.”“Well, I am not trying tosellyou any,”I am sometimes goaded into protesting.“I only wanted you to say they are pretty—pretty right here inmygarden.”“Yes—yes—of course they are pretty—they’re lovely—you have a lovely garden, you know.”She pulls herself up to give this tribute, but soon her eyes get the faraway look in them again, and she is murmuring,“Oh, I must write Edward to see about that hedge. Tell me, my dear, if you had a brick wall, would you have vines on it or wall-fruit?”[pg 099]It is of no use. I cannot hold her long. I sometimes think she was nicer when she had no garden of her own. Perhaps she thinks I was nicer when I had none.But there is another kind of garden manners—a kind that subtly soothes, cheers, perhaps inebriates. It is the manner of the friend who may, indeed, have a garden, but who looks at mine with the eye of adoption, temporarily at least. She walks down its paths, singling out this or that for notice. She suggests, she even criticizes, tenderly, as one who tells you an“evenmorebecoming way”to arrange your little daughter’s hair. She offers you roots and seeds and seedlings from her garden, and—last touch of flattery—she begs seeds and seedlings from yours.For garden purposes, give me the manners of this third class. And, indeed, not for garden purposes alone. They are useful as applied to many things—children, particularly, and houses.Undoubtedly the demand that I make upon my friends is a form of vanity, yet I cannot seem to feel ashamed of it. I admit at once that not the least part of my pleasure in[pg 100]my flowers is the attention they get from others. Moreover, it is not only from friends that I seek this, but from every passer-by along my country road. There are gardens and gardens. Some, set about with hedges tall and thick, offer the delights of exclusiveness and solitude. But exclusiveness and solitude are easily had on a Connecticut farm, and my garden will none of them; it flings forth its appeal to every wayfarer. And I like it. I like my garden to“get notice.”As people drive by I hope they enjoy my phlox. I furtively glance to see if they have an eye for the foxglove. I wonder if the calendulas are so tall that they hide the asters. And if, as I bend over my weeding, an automobile whirling past lets fly an appreciative phrase—“lovely flowers—”“wonderful yellow of—”“garden there,”—my ears are quick to receive it and I forgive the eddies of gasolene and dust that are also left by the vanishing visitant.About few things can one be so brazen in one’s enjoyment of recognition. One’s house, one’s clothes, one’s work, one’s children, all these demand a certain modesty of demeanor,[pg 101]however the inner spirit may puff. Not so one’s garden. I fancy this is because, while I have a strong sense of ownership in it, I also have a strong sense of stewardship. As owner I must be modest, but as steward I may admire as openly as I will. Did I make my phlox? Did I fashion my asters? Am I the artificer of my fringed larkspur? Nay, truly, I am but their caretaker, and may glory in them as well as another, only with the added touch of joy that I, even I, have given them their opportunity. Like Paul I plant, like Apollos I water, but before the power that giveth the increase I stand back and wonder.But it is not alone the results of my stewardship that give me joy. Its very processes are good. Delight in the earth is a primitive instinct. Digging is naturally pleasant, hoeing is pleasant, raking is pleasant, and then there is the weeding. For I am not the only one who sows seeds in my garden. One of my friends remarked cheerfully that he had planted twenty-seven different vegetables in his garden, and the Lord had planted two hundred and twenty-seven other kinds of things.[pg 102]This is where the weeding comes in. Now a good deal has been said about the labor of weeding, but little about the gratifications of weeding. I don’t mean weeding with a hoe. I mean yanking up, with movements suited to the occasion, each individual growing thing that doesn’t belong. Surely I am not the only one to have felt the pleasure of this. They come up so nicely, and leave such soft earth behind! And intellect is needed, too, for each weed demands its own way of handling: the adherent plantain needing a slow, firm, drawing motion, but very satisfactory when it comes; the evasive clover requiring that all its sprawling runners shall be gathered up in one gentle, tactful pull; the tender shepherd’s purse coming easily on a straight twitch; the tough ragweed that yields to almost any kind of jerk. Even witch-grass, the bane of the farmer, has its rewarding side, when one really does get out its handful of wicked-looking, crawly, white tubers.Weeding is most fun when the weeds are not too small. Yes, from the aspect of a sport there is something to be said for letting weeds grow. Pulling out little tender ones is poor[pg 103]work compared with the satisfaction of hauling up a spreading treelet of ragweed or a far-flaunting wild buckwheat. You seem to get so much for your effort, and it stirs up the ground so, and no other weeds have grown under the shade of the big one, so its departure leaves a good bit of empty brown earth.Surely, weeding is good fun. If faults could be yanked out of children in the same entertaining way, the orphan asylums would soon be emptied through the craze for adoption as a major sport.One of the pleasantest mornings of my life was spent weeding, in the rain, a long-neglected corner of my garden, while a young friend stood around the edges and explained the current political situation to me, and carted away armfuls of green stuff as I handed them out to him. The rain drizzled, and the air was fragrant with the smell of wet earth and bruised stems. Ideally, of course, weeds should never reach this state of sportive rankness. But most of my friends admit, under pressure, that there are corners where such things do happen.[pg 104]Naturally, all this is assuming that one is one’s own gardener. There may be pleasure in having a garden kept up by a real gardener, but that always seems to me a little like having a doll and letting somebody else dress and undress it. My garden must never grow so big that I cannot take care of it—and neglect it—myself.In saying this, however, I don’t count rocks. When it comes to rocks, I call in Jonathan. And it often comes to rocks.For mine is a Connecticut garden. Now in the beginning Connecticut was composed entirely of rocks. Then the little earth gnomes, fearing that no one would ever come there to give them sport, sprinkled a little earth amongst the rocks, partly covered some, wholly covered others, and then hid to see what the gardeners would do about it. And ever since the gardeners have been patiently, or impatiently, tucking in their seeds and plants in the thimblefuls of earth left by the gnomes. They have been picking out the rocks, or blowing them up, or burying them, or working around them; and every winter the little gnomes gather and push up a new[pg 105]lot from the dark storehouses of the underworld. In the spring the gardeners begin again, and the little gnomes hold their sides with still laughter to watch the work go on.“Rocks?”my friends say.“Do you mind the rocks? But they are a special beauty! Why, I have a rock in my garden that I have treated—”“Very well,”I interrupt rudely.“A rockis all very well. If I hada rockin my garden I could treat it, too. But how about a garden that is all rocks?”“Oh—why—choose another spot.”Whereupon I reply,“You don’t know Connecticut.”Ever since I began having a garden I have had my troubles with the rocks, but the worst time came when, in a mood of enthusiastic and absolutely unintelligent optimism, I decided to have a bit of smooth grass in the middle of my garden. I wanted it very much. The place was too restless; you couldn’t sit down anywhere. I felt that I had to have a clear green spot where I could take a chair and a book. I selected the spot, marked it off with string, and began to loosen up the earth[pg 106]for a late summer planting of grass seed. Calendulas and poppies and cornflowers had bloomed there before, self-sown and able to look out for themselves, so I had never investigated the depths of the bed to see what the little gnomes had prepared for me. Now I found out. The spading-fork gave a familiar dull clink as it struck rock. I felt about for the edge; it was a big one. I got the crowbar and dropped it, in testing prods; it was averybig one, and only four inches below the surface. Grass would never grow there in a dry season. I moved to another part. Another rock, big too! I prodded all over the allotted space, and found six big fellows lurking just below the top of the soil. Evidently it was a case for calling in Jonathan.He came, grumbling a little, as a man should, but very efficient, armed with two crowbars and equipped with a natural genius for manipulating rocks. He made a few well-placed remarks about queer people who choose to have grass where flowers would grow, and flowers where grass would grow, also about Connecticut being intended for a quarry and not for a garden anyhow. But all[pg 107]this was only the necessary accompaniment of the crowbar-play. Soon, under the insistent and canny urgency of the bars, a big rock began to heave its shoulder into sight above the soil. I hovered about, chucking in stones and earth underneath, placing little rocks under the bar for fulcrums, pulling them out again when they were no longer needed, standing guard over the flowers in the rest of the garden, with repeated warnings.“Please, Jonathan, don’t step back any farther; you’ll trample the forget-me-nots!”“Couldyou manage to roll this fellow out along that path and not across the mangled bodies of the marigolds?”Jonathan grumbled a little about being expected to pick a half-ton pebble out of the garden with his fingers, or lead it out with a string.“Oh, well, of course, if youcan’tdo it I’ll have to let the marigolds go this year. But you do such wonderful things with a crowbar, I thought you could probably just guide it a little.”And Jonathan responds nobly to the flattery of this remark, and does indeed guide the huge thing, eases it along the narrow path, grazes the marigolds but leaves them[pg 108]unhurt, until at last, with a careful arrangement of stone fulcrums and a skillful twist of the bars, the great rock makes its last response and lunges heavily past the last flower bed on to the grass beyond.When the work was done, the edge of the garden looked like Stonehenge, and the spot where my grass was to be was nothing but a yawning pit, crying to be filled. We surveyed it with interest.“If we had a water-supply, I wouldn’t make a grass-plot,”I said;“I’d make a swimming-pool. It’s deep enough.”“And sit in the middle with your book?”asked Jonathan.But there was no water-supply, so we filled it in with earth. Thirty wheelbarrow loads went in where those rocks came out. And the little gnomes perched on Stonehenge and jeered the while. I photographed it, and the rocks“took”well, but as regards the gnomes, the film was underexposed.Thus the grass seed was planted. And we reminded each other of the version of“America”once given, with unconscious inspiration, by a little friend of ours:—[pg 109]“Land where our father died,Land where the pilgrims pried.”It seemed to us to suit the adventure.As I have said, I love to have my friends love my garden. But there is one thing about it that I find does not always appeal to them pleasantly, and that is its color-schemes. Yet this is not my doing. For in nothing do I feel more keenly the fact of my mere stewardship than in this matter of color-scheme.I set out with a very rigid one. I was quite decided in my own mind that what I wanted was white and salmon-pink and lavender. Asters, phlox, sweet peas, hollyhocks, all were to bend themselves to my rules. At first affairs went very well. White was easy. White phlox I had, and have—an inheritance—which from a few roots is spreading and spreading in waves of whiteness that grow more luxuriant every year. But I bought roots of salmon-pink and lavender, and then my troubles commenced. About the third season strange things began to happen. The pink phlox had the strength of ten. It spread amazingly; but it forgot all about my rules. It degenerated, some of it—reverted[pg 110]toward that magenta shade that nature seems so naturally to adore in the vegetable world. To my horror I found my garden blossoming into magenta pink, blue pink, crimson, cardinal—all the colors I had determined not under any circumstances to admit. On the other hand, the lavender phlox, which I particularly wanted, was most lovely, but frail. It refused to spread. It effaced itself before the rampant pink and its magenta-tainted brood. I vowed I would pull out the magentas, but each year my courage failed. They bloomed so bravely; I would wait till they were through. But by that time I was not quite sure which was which; I might pull out the wrong ones. And so I hesitated.Moreover, I discovered, lingering among the flowers at dusk, that there were certain colors, most unpleasant by daylight, which at that time took on a new shade, and, for perhaps half an hour before night fell, were richly lovely. This is true of some of the magentas, which at dusk turn suddenly to royal purples and deep lavender-blues that are wonderfully satisfying.[pg 111]For that half-hour of beauty I spare them. While the sun shines I try to look the other way, and at twilight I linger near them and enjoy their strange, dim glories, born literally of the magic hour. But I have trouble explaining them, by daylight, to some of my visitors who like color-schemes.Insubordination is contagious. And I found after a while that my asters were not running true; queer things were happening among the sweet peas, and in the ranks of the hollyhocks all was not as it should be. And the last charge was made upon me by the children’s gardens. Children know not color-schemes. What they demand is flowers, flowers—flowers to pick and pick, flowers to do things with. Snapdragon, for instance, is a jolly playmate, and little fingers love to pinch its cheeks and see its jaws yawn wide. But snapdragon tends dangerously toward the magenta. Then there was the calendula—a delight to the young, because it blooms incessantly long past the early frosts, and has brittle stems that yield themselves to the clumsiest plucking by small hands. But calendula ranges from a faded yellow, through[pg 112]really pretty primrose shades, to a deep red-orange touched with maroon.And, finally, there was the portulaca. Children love it, perhaps, best of all. It offers them fresh blossoms and new colors each morning, and it is even more easy to pick than the calendula. Who would deny them portulaca? Yet if this be admitted, one may as well give up the battle. For, as we all know, there is absolutely no color, except green, that portulaca does not perpetrate in its blossoms. It knows no shame.In short, I am giving up. I am beginning to say with conviction that color-schemes are the mark of a narrow and rigid taste—that they are born of convention and are meant not for living things but for wall-papers and portières and clothes. Moreover, I am really growing callous—or is it, rather, broad? Colors in my garden that would once have made my teeth ache now leave them feeling perfectly comfortable. I find myself looking with unmoved flesh—no creeps nor withdrawals—upon a bed of mixed magentas, scarlets, rose-pinks, and yellow-pinks. I even look with pleasure. I begin to think there[pg 113]may be a point beyond which discord achieves a higher harmony. At least, this sounds well. But, again, I find it hard to explain to some of my friends.Indoors, it is another story. When I bring in the spoils of the garden I am again mistress and bend all to my will. Here I’ll have no tricks of color played on me. Sunshine and sky, perhaps, work some spell, for as soon as I get within four walls my prejudices return; scarlets and crimsons and pinks have to live in different rooms. I must have my color-schemes again, and perhaps I am as narrow as the worst. Except, indeed, for the children’s bowls; here the pink and the magenta, the lamb and the lion, may lie down together. But it takes a little child to lead them.* * * * *Out in my garden I feel myself less and less owner, more and more merely steward. I decree certain paths, and the phlox says,“Paths? Did you say paths?”and obliterates them in a season’s growth, so that children walk by faith and not by sight. I decree iris in one corner, and the primroses say,“Iris? Not at all. This is our bed. Iris indeed!”[pg 114]And I submit, and move the iris elsewhere.And yet this slipping of responsibility is pleasant, too. So long as my garden will let me dig in it and weed it and pick it, so long as it entertains my friends for me, so long as it tosses up an occasional rock so that Jonathan does not lose all interest in it, so long as it plays prettily with the children and flings gay greetings to every passer-by, I can find no fault with it.The joys of stewardship are great and I am well content.[pg 115]VITrout and ArbutusEvery year, toward the end of March, I find Jonathan poking about in my sewing-box. And, unless I am very absent-minded, I know what he is after.“No use looking there,”I remark;“I keep my silks put away.”“I want red, and as strong as there is.”“I know what you want. Here.”and I hand him a spool of red buttonhole twist.“Ah! Just right!”And for the rest of the evening his fingers are busy.Over what? Mending our trout-rods, of course. It is pretty work, calling for strength and precision of grasp, and as he winds and winds, adjusting all the little brass leading-rings, or supplying new ones, and staying points in the bamboo where he suspects weakness, we talk over last year’s trout-pools, and wonder what they will be like this year.But beyond wonder we do not get, often for weeks after the trout season is, legislatively,[pg 116]“open.”Jonathan is“busy.”I am“busy.”We know that, if April passes, there is still May and June, and so, if at the end of April, or early May, we do at last pick up our rods,—all new-bedight with red silk windings, and shiny with fresh varnish,—it is not alone the call of the trout that decides us, but another call which is to me at least more imperious, because, if we neglect it now, there is no May and June in which to heed it. It is the call of the arbutus.Any one with New England traditions knows what this call is. Its appeal is to something far deeper than the love of a pretty flower. For it is the flower that, to our fathers and our grandfathers, and to their fathers and grandfathers, meant spring; and not spring in its prettiness and ease, appealing to the idler in us, nor spring in its melancholy, appealing to—shall I say the poet in us? But spring in its blessedness of opportunity, its joyously triumphant life, appealing to the worker in us. Here, of course, we touch hands with all the races of the world for whom winter has been the supreme menace, spring the supreme and saving miracle. But each race has its own[pg 117]symbols, and to the New Englander the symbol is the arbutus.This may seem a bit of sentimentality. And, indeed, we need not expect to find it expressed by any New England farmer. New England does not go out in gay companies to bring back the first blossoms. But New England does nothing in gay companies. It has been taught to distrust ceremonies and expression of any sort. It rejoices with reticence, it appreciates with a reservation. And yet I have seen a sprig of arbutus in rough and clumsy buttonholes on weather-faded lapels which, the rest of the twelve-month through, know no other flower. And when, in unfamiliar country, I have interrupted the ploughing to ask for guidance, I usually get it:—“Arbutus? Yaas. The’s a lot of it up along that hillside and in the woods over beyond—’t was out last week, some of it, I happened to notice”—this in the apologetic tone of one who admits a weakness—“guess you’ll find all you want.”I venture to say that of no other wild flower, except those which work specific harm or good, could I get such information.[pg 118]To many of us, city-bred, the tradition comes through inheritance. It means, perhaps, the shy, poetic side of our father’s boyhood, only half acknowledged, after the New England fashion, but none the less real and none the less our possession. It means rare days, when the city—whose chiefest signs of spring were the flare of dandelions in yards and parks and the chatter of English sparrows on ivy-clad church walls—was left behind, and we were“in the country.”It was a country excitingly different from the country of the summer vacation, a country not deeply green, but warmly brown, and sweet with the smell of moist, living earth. Green enough, indeed, in the spring-fed meadows and folds of the hills, where the early grass flashes into vividest emerald, but in the woods the soft mist-colored mazes of multitudinous twigs still show through their veilings and dustings of color—palest green of birches, gray-green of poplar, yellow-green of willows, and redder tones of the maples; and along the fence-lines and roadsides—blessed, untidy fence-lines and roadsides of New England—a fine penciling of red stems—the cut-back[pg 119]maple bushes and tangled vines alive to their tips and just bursting into leaf. And everywhere in the woods, on fence-lines and roadsides, the white blossoms of the“shad-blow,”daintiest of spring trees,—too slight for a tree, indeed, though too tall for a bush and looking less like a tree in blossom than like floating blossoms caught for a moment among the twigs. A moment only, for the first gust loosens them again and carpets the woods with their petals, but while they last their whiteness shimmers everywhere.Such rare days were all blown through with the wonderful wind of spring. Spring wind is really different from any other. It is not a finished thing, like the mellow winds of summer and the cold blasts of winter. It is an imperfect blend of shivering reminiscence and eager promise. One moment it breathes sun and stirring earth, the next it reminds us of old snow in the hollows, and bleak northern slopes.When, on these days, the wind blew to us, almost before we saw it, the first greeting of the arbutus, it always seemed that the day had found its complete and satisfying expression.[pg 120]Every one comes to realize, at some time in his life, the power of suggestion possessed by odors. Does not half the power of the Church lie in its incense? An odor, just because it is at once concrete and formless, can carry an appeal overwhelmingly strong and searching, superseding all other expression. This is the appeal made to me by the arbutus. It can never be quite precipitated into words, but it holds in solution all the things it has come to mean—dear human tradition and beloved companionship, the poetry of the land and the miracle of new birth.In late March or early April I am likely to see the first blossom on some friend’s table—I try not to see it first in a florist’s display! To my startled question she gives reassuring answer,“Oh, no, not from around here. This came from Virginia.”Days pass, and, perhaps, the mail brings some to me, this time from Pennsylvania or New Jersey, and soon I can no longer ignore the trays of tight, leafless bunches for sale on street corners and behind plate-glass windows.“From York State,”they tell me. I grow restive.[pg 121]“Jonathan,”I say, holding up a spray for him to smell,“we’ve got to go. You can’t resist that. We’ll take a day and go for it—and trout, too.”It is as well that arbutus comes in the trout season, for to take a day off just to pick a flower might seem a little absurd. But, coupled with trout—all is well. Trout is food. One must eat. The search for food needs no defense, and yet, the curious fact is, that if you go for trout and don’t get any, it doesn’t make so much difference as you might suppose, but if you go for arbutus and don’t get any, it makes all the difference in the world. And so Jonathan knows that in choosing his brook for that particular day, he must have regard primarily to the arbutus it will give us and only secondarily to the trout.Every one knows the kind of brook that is, for every one knows the kind of country arbutus loves—hilly country, with slopes toward the north; bits of woodland, preferably with pine in it, to give shade, but not too deep shade; a scrub undergrowth of laurel and huckleberry and bay; and always, somewhere[pg 122]within sight or hearing, water. It is curious how arbutus, which never grows in wet places, yet seems to like the neighborhood of water. It loves the slopes above a brook or the shaggy hillsides overlooking a little pond or river.Fortunately, there is such a brook, in just such country, on our list. There are not so many trout as in other brooks, but enough to justify our rods; and not so much arbutus as I could find elsewhere, but enough—oh, enough!To this brook we go. We tie Kit at the bridge, Jonathan slings on a fish-basket, to do for both, and I take a box or two for the flowers. But from this moment on our interests are somewhat at variance. The fact is, Jonathan cares a little more about the trout than about the arbutus, while I care a little more about the arbutus than about the trout. His eye is keenly on the brook, mine is, yearningly, on the ragged hillsides that roll up above it.Jonathan feels this.“There isn’t any for two fields yet—might as well stick to the brook.”[pg 123]“I know. I thought perhaps I’d go on down and let you fish this part. Then I’d meet you beyond the second fence—”“Oh, no, that won’t do at all. Why, there’s a rock just below here—down by that wild cherry—where I took out a beauty last year, and left another. I want you to go down and get him.”“You get him. I don’t mind.”“Oh, but I mind. Here, I’ve got it all planned: there’s a bit of brush-fishing just below—”“No brush-fishing for me, please!”“That’s what I’m saying, if you’ll only give me time. I’ll take that—there are always two or three in there—and when you’ve finished here you can go around me and fish the bend, under the hemlocks, and then the first arbutus is just beside that, and I’ll join you there.”“Well”—I assent grudgingly—“only, really, I’d be just as happy if you’d fish the whole thing and let me go right on down—”“No, you wouldn’t. Now, remember to sneak before you get to that rock. Drop in six feet above it and let the current do the[pg 124]rest. They’re awfully shy. I expect you to get at least one there, and two down at the bend.”He trudges off to his brush-fishing and leaves me bound in honor to extract a trout from under that rock. I deposit my boxes in the meadow above it, and“sneak”down. The sneak of a trout fisherman is like no other form of locomotion, and I am convinced that the human frame was not evolved with it in mind. But I resort to it in deference to Jonathan’s prejudices—in deference, also, to the fact that when I do not the trout seldom bite. And Jonathan is so trustfully counting on my getting that trout!I did get him. I dropped in my line, as per directions, and let the current do the rest; had the thrill of feeling the line suddenly caught and drawn under the rock, held, then wiggled slightly; I struck, felt the weight, drew back steadily, and in a few moments there was a flopping in the grass behind me.So that was off my mind.I strung him on a twig of wild cherry, gathered up my boxes, and wandered along the faint path, back of the patch of brush where, I knew, Jonathan was cheerfully[pg 125]threading his line through tangles of twig, briar, and vine, compared with which the needle’s eye is as a yawning barn door. Jonathan’s attitude toward brush-fishing is something which I respect without understanding. Down one long field I went, where the brook ran in shallow gayety, and there, ahead, was the bend, a sudden curve of water, deepening under the roots of an overhanging hemlock. I climbed the stone wall beside, glanced at the water—very trouty water indeed—glanced at the hill-pasture above—very arbutusy indeed—laid down my rod and my trout and my box, and ran up the low bank to a clump of bay and berry-bushes that I thought I remembered.… Yes! There it was! I had remembered! Ah! The dear things!When you first find arbutus, there is only one thing to do:—lie right down beside it. Its fragrance as it grows is different from what it is after it is picked, because with the sweetness of the blossoms is mingled the good smell of the earth and of the woody twigs and of the dried grass and leaves. And there are other rewards one gets by lying down. It is[pg 126]all very well to talk proudly about man’s walking with his head erect and his face to the heavens, but if we keep that posture all the time we miss a good deal. The attitude of the toad and the lizard is not to be scorned, though when the needs of locomotion convert it into the fisherman’s“sneak,”it is, as I have suggested, to be sparingly indulged in. But if we could only nibble now and then from“the other side”of Alice’s mushroom, what a new outlook we should get on the world that now lies about our feet! What new aspects of its beauty would be revealed to us: the forest grandeurs of the grass, the architecture of its slim shafts with their pillared aisles and pointed arches of interlocking and upspringing curves, their ceiling traceries of spraying tops against a far-away background of sky!To know arbutus, you must stoop to its level, and look across the fine, frosty fur of its stiff little leaves, and feel the nestle of its stems to the ground, the little up-fling of their tips toward the sun, and the neat radiance of its flower clusters, with their blessed fragrance and their pure, babyish color.[pg 127]But after that? You want to pick it. Yes, you really want to pick it!In this it is different from other flowers. Most of them I am well content to leave where they grow. In fact, the love of picking things—flowers or anything else—is a youthful taste: we lose it as we grow older; we become more and more willing to appreciate without acquiring, or rather, appreciation becomes to us a finer and more spiritual form of acquiring. Is it possible that, after all, the old idea of heaven as a state of enraptured contemplation is in harmony with the trend of our development?But if there is arbutus in heaven, I shall need to develop a good deal further not to want to pick it. It suggests picking; it almost invites it. There is something about the way it nestles and hides, that makes you want to see it better. Here is a spray of pure white, living under a green tent of overlapping leaves; one must raise it, and nip off just one leaf, so that the blossoms can see out. There is another, a pink cluster, showing faintly through the dry, matted grass. You feel for the stem, pull it gently, and, lo, it is many[pg 128]stems, which have crept their way under the tangle, and every one is tipped with a cluster of stars or round little buds each on its long stem, fairly begging to be picked. It gets picked.Yet sometimes its very beauty has stayed my hand. I shall never forget one clump I found, growing out of a bank of deep green moss, partly shaded by a great hemlock. The soft pink blossoms—luxuriant leafy sprays of them—were lying out on the moss in a pagan carelessness of beauty, as though some god had willed it there for his pleasure. I sat beside it a long time, and in the end I left it without picking it.On this particular day, Jonathan being still lost in the brush patch, I had risen from my visit with the first-discovered blossoms and wandered on, from clump to clump, wherever the glimpse of a leaf attracted me, picking the choicest here and there and dropping them into my box. After I do not know how long, I was roused by Jonathan’s whistle. I was some distance up the hillside by this time, and he was beside the brook, at the bend.[pg 129]“What luck?”he called.“Good luck! I’ve found lots. Come up!”He took a few steps up toward me, so that conversation could drop from shouting to speaking levels.“How many did you get?”he asked.“How many?… Oh … why … Oh, I got one up there where you showed me—under the rock, you know.”“Good one?”“Eight inches. He’s down there by the bars.”“Good! And what about the bend?”“The bend? Oh, I didn’t fish there—look at these! Aren’t they beauties?”I came down the hill to hold my open box up to his face. But my casual word almost effaced the scent of the flowers.“Ah—yes—delicious—didn’t fish there? Why not? Did they see you?”“Who? The trout? I don’t know. But I saw this. And I just had to pick it.”“Well! You’re a great fisherman! And with that water right there beside you! Lord!”“With the arbutus right here beside me! Lord!”[pg 130]“But the arbutus would wait.”“But the trout would wait. They’re waiting for you now, don’t you hear them? Go and fish there!”“No. That’s your pool.”Jonathan has a way of bestowing a trout-pool on me as if it were a bouquet. To refuse its opportunities is almost like throwing his flowers back in his face.“Well—of course it’s a beautiful pool—”“Best on the brook,”murmured Jonathan.“But, truly, I’d enjoy it just as much to have you fish it.”“Nobody can fish it now for a while. I thought you’d be there, of course, and I came stamping along down, close by the bank. They wouldn’t bite now—not for half an hour, anyway.”“Well, then, that’s just right. We’ll go on up the hillside for half an hour, and then come back and fish it. Set your rod up against the bayberry here, and come along—look there! you’re almost stepping on some!”Jonathan, gradually adjusting himself to the turn of things, stood his rod up against the bush with the meticulous care of the true[pg 131]sportsman.“Where did you leave yours?”he asked, with a suspiciousness born of a deep knowledge of my character.“Oh, down by the bars.”“Standing up or lying down?”“Lying down, I think. It’s all right.”“It’s not all right if it’s lying down. Anything might trample on it.”“For instance, what?—birds or crickets?”“For instance, people or cows.”He strode down the hill, and I saw him stoop. As he returned I could read disapproval in his gait.“Will you never learn how to treat a rod! It was lying just beyond the bars. I must have landed within two feet of it when I jumped over.”“I’m sorry. I meant to go back. I know perfectly how to treat a rod. My trouble comes in knowing when to apply my knowledge.… Well, let’s go up there. Near those big hemlocks there’s some, I remember.”And we wandered on, separating a little to scan the ground more widely.Once having pried his mind away from the trout, Jonathan was as keen for arbutus as I could wish, and soon I heard an exclamation,[pg 132]and saw him kneel.“Oh, come over!”he called;“you really ought to see this growing!”“But there’s some I want, right here, that’s lovely—”“Never mind. Come and see this—oh, come!”Of course I come, and of course I am glad I came, and of course soon I am obliged to call Jonathan to see some I have found—“Jonathan, it is truly the loveliestyet!It’s the way it grows—with the moss and all—please come!”And of course he comes.We had been on the hillside a long half-hour, much nearer an hour, when Jonathan began to grow restive.“Don’t you think you have enough?”he suggested several times. Finally, he spoke plainly of the trout.“Oh, yes, of course,”I said,“you go down and I’ll follow just as soon as I’ve gone along that upper path.”Not at all. That was not what was wanted. So I turned and we went down the hill, back to the bend, whose seductions I had been so puzzlingly able to resist. I am sure Jonathan has never yet quite understood how I could[pg 133]leave that bit of water at my left hand and turn away to the right.“Now—sneak!”We sneaked, and I sank down just back of the edge of the bank. Jonathan crouched some feet behind, coaching me:—“Now—draw out a little more line—not too much—there—and have some slack in your hand. Now, up-stream fifteen feet—allow for the wind—wait till that gust passes—now! Good! First-rate! Now let her drift—there—what did I tell you? Give him line!Givehim line! Now, feel of him—careful! You’ll know when to strike … there!… Oh! too bad!”For as I struck, my line held fast.“Snagged, by gummy! Can’t you pull clear?”“Not without stirring up the whole pool. You’ll have to do the fishing, after all.”“Oh!toobad! That’s hard luck!”“Not a bit. I like to watch you do it.”And so indeed I did. Once having realized that I was temporarily laid by, Jonathan put his whole mind on the pool, while I, being honorably released from all responsibility,[pg 134]except that of keeping my line taut, could put my whole mind on his performance. There is a little the same sort of pleasure in watching the skillful handling of a rod that there is in watching the bow-action of a violinist. Both things demand the utmost nicety of adjustment: body, arm, wrist, fingers uniting in an interplay of efficiency exactly adapted to the intricately shifting needs of each moment.Thus I watched, through the typical stages of the sport: the delicate flip of the bait into the current at just the right spot; its swift descent, imperceptibly guided by the rod’s quivering tip; its slower drift toward deep water; its sudden vanishing, and the whir of the reel as the line goes out; then the pause, the critical moments of“feeling for him”; at last the strike … and then, a flopping in the grass behind me, and Jonathan crawling back to kill and unhook him.“Don’t get up. There’s probably another one,”he said; and soon, by the same reptilian methods, was back for another try. There was another one, and yet another, and then a little fellow, barely hooked.“That’s all,”[pg 135]said Jonathan, as he rose to put him back into the pool, and we watched the pretty spotted creature fling himself upstream with a wild flourish of his gleaming body.“Now I’ll get you clear,”said Jonathan, wading out into the water, and, with sleeves rolled high, feeling deep, deep down under the opposite bank.“He had you all right—it’s wound round a root and then jabbed deep into it … hard luck! I wanted you to get those fellows!”And to this day I am sure he remembers those trout with a tinge of regret.I had intended leaving him to fish the rest of the brook, while I went back to that upper path to look up two or three special arbutus clumps that I knew, but seeing his depression over the snag incident, I could not suggest this. Instead I followed the stream with him, accepting his urgent offer of all the best pools, while he, taking what was left, drew out perfectly good trout from the most unhopeful-looking bits of water. And at the end, there was time to return along the upper path and visit my old friends, so both of us were satisfied.[pg 136]On such days, however, there is always one person who is not satisfied, and that is, Kit the horse. Kit has borne with our vagaries for many years, but she has never come to understand them. She never fails to greet our return, as our voices come within the range of her pricked-up ears, by a prolonged and reproachful whinny, which says as plainly as is necessary,“Back? Well—I shouldthinkit was time!I should think it was TIME!”Now and then we have thought it would be pleasant to have a little motor-car that could be tucked away at any roadside, without reference to a good hitching-place, but if we had it, I am sure we should miss that ungracious welcoming whinny. We should miss, too, the exasperated violence of Kit’s pace on the first bit of the home road—a violence expressing in the most ostentatious manner her opinion of folks who keep a respectable horse hitched by the roadside, far from the delights of the dim, sweet stable and the dusty, sneezy, munchy hay.But leaving out this little matter of Kit’s preference, and also the other little matter of the trout’s preference, I feel sure that an arbutus-trouting[pg 137]is peculiarly satisfying. It meets every human need—the need of food and beauty, the need of feeling strong and skillful, the need of becoming deeply aware of nature as living and kind. Moreover, it is very satisfying afterwards. As we sat that evening, over a late supper, with a shallow dish of arbutus beside us, I remarked,“The advantage of getting arbutus is, that you bring the whole day home with you and have it at your elbow.”“The advantage of getting trout,”remarked Jonathan dreamily, as if to himself,“is, that you bring your whole day home with you, and have it for breakfast.”

[pg 083]IVAfter FrostIt is late afternoon in mid-September. I stand in my garden sniffing the raw air, and wondering, as always at this season,willthere be frost to-night or will there not? Of course if I were a woodchuck or a muskrat, or any other really intelligent creature, I should know at once and act accordingly, but being only a stupid human being, I am thrown back on conjecture, assisted by the thermometer, and an appeal to Jonathan.“Too much wind for frost,”says he.“Sure? I’d hate to lose my nasturtiums quite so early.”“You won’t lose ’em. Look at the thermometer if you don’t believe me. If it’s above forty you’re safe.”I look, and try to feel reassured. But I am not quite easy in my mind until next morning when, running out before breakfast, I make the rounds and find everything untouched.[pg 084]But a few days later the alarm comes again. There is no wind this time, and, what is worse, an ominous silence falls at dusk over the orchard and meadow.“Why is everything so still?”I ask myself.“Oh, of course—the katydids aren’t talking—and the crickets, and all the other whirr-y things. Ah! That means business! My poor garden!”“Jonathan!”I call, as I feel rather than see his shape whirling noiselessly in at the big gate after his ride up from the station.“Help me cover my nasturtiums. There’ll be frost to-night.”“Maybe,”says Jonathan’s voice.“Not maybe at all—surely. Listen to the katydids!”“You mean, listen to the absence of katydids.”“Very well. The point is, I want newspapers.”“No. The point is, I am to bring newspapers.”“Exactly.”“And tuck up your nasturtiums for the night in your peculiarly ridiculous fashion—”[pg 085]“I know it looks ridiculous, but really it’s sensible. There may be weeks of summer after this.”And so the nasturtiums are tucked up, cozily hidden under the big layers of sheets, whose corners we fasten down with stones. To be sure, the gardenisrather a funny sight, with these pale shapes sprawling over its beds. But it pays. For in the morning, though over in the vegetable garden the squash leaves and lima beans are blackened and limp, my nasturtiums are still pert and crisp. I pull off the papers, wondering what the passers-by have thought, and lo! my gay garden, good for perhaps two weeks more!But a day arrives when even newspaper coddling is of no avail. Sometimes it is in late September, sometimes not until October, but when it comes there is no resisting.The sun goes down, leaving a clear sky paling to green at the horizon. A still cold falls upon the world, and I feel that it is the end. Shears in hand, I cut everything I can—nasturtiums down to the ground,—leaves, buds, and all,—feathery sprays of cosmos, asters by the armful. Those last[pg 086]bouquets that I bring into the house are always the most beautiful, for I do not have to save buds for later cutting. There will, alas, be no later cutting.So I fill my bowls and vases, and next morning I go out, well knowing what I shall see. It is a beautiful sight, too, if one can forget its meaning. The whole golden-green world of autumn has been touched with silver. In the low-lying swamp beyond the orchard it is almost like a light snowfall. The meadows rising beyond the barns are silvered over wherever the long tree-shadows still lie. And in my garden, too, where the shadows linger, every leaf is frosted, but as soon as the sun warms them through, leaf and twig turn dark and droop to the ground. It is the end.Except, indeed, for my brave marigolds and calendulas and little button asters. It is for this reason that I have given them space all summer, nipping them back when they tried to blossom early, for they seem a bit crude compared with the other flowers. But now that frost is here, my feelings warm to them. I cannot criticize their color and texture,[pg 087]so grateful am I to them for not giving up. And when last night’s cuttings have faded, I shall be very glad of a glowing mass of marigold beside my fireplace, and of the yellow stars of calendula, like embodied sunshine, on my dining-table.Well, then, the frost has come! And after the first pang of realization, I find that, curiously enough, the worst is over. Since it has come, let it come! And now—hurrah for the garden house-cleaning! The garden is dead—the garden of yesterday! Long live the garden—the garden of to-morrow! For suddenly my mind has leaped ahead to spring.I can hardly wait for breakfast to be over, before I am out in working clothes, pulling up things—not weeds now, but flowers, or what were flowers. Nasturtiums, asters, cosmos, snapdragon, stock, late-blooming cornflowers—up they all come, all the annuals, and the biennials that have had their season. I fling them together in piles, and soon have small haystacks all along my grass paths, and—there I am! Down again to the good brown earth!It is with positive satisfaction that I stand[pg 088]and survey my beds, great bare patches of earth, glorified here and there by low clumps of calendula and great bushes of marigold. Now, then! I can do anything! I can dig, and fertilize, and transplant. Best of all, I can plan and plan! The crisp wind stings my cheeks, but as I work I feel the sun hot on the back of my neck. I get the smell of the earth as I turn it over, mingled with the pungent tang of marigold blossoms, very pleasant out of doors, though almost too strong for the house except near a fireplace. I believe the most characteristic fall odors are to me this of marigold, mingled with the fragrance of apples piled in the orchard, the good smell of earth newly turned up, and the flavor of burning leaves, borne now and then on the wind, from the outdoor house-cleaning of the world.There is perhaps no season of all the garden year that brings more real delight to the gardener, no time so stimulating to the imagination. This year in the garden has been good, but next year shall be better. All the failures, or near-failures, shall of course be turned into successes, and the successes shall[pg 089]be bettered. Last year there were not quite enough hollyhocks, but next year there shall be such glories! There are seedlings that I have been saving, over on the edge of the phlox. I dash across to look them up—yes, here they are, splendid little fellows, leaves only a bit crumpled by the frost. I dig them up carefully, keeping earth packed about their roots, and one by one I convey them across and set them out in a beautiful row where I want them to grow next year. Their place is beside the old stone-flagged path, and I picture them rising tall against the side of the woodshed, whose barrenness I have besides more than half covered with honeysuckle.Then, there are my foxgloves. Some of them I have already transplanted, but not all. There is a little corner full of stocky yearlings that I must change now. And that same corner can be used for poppies. I have kept seeds of this year’s poppies—funny little brown pepper-shakers, with tiny holes at the end through which I shake out the fine seed dust. Doubtless they would attend to all this without my help, but I like to be sure[pg 090]that even my self-seeding annuals come up where I most want them.Biennials, like the foxglove and canterbury bells, are of course, the difficult children of the garden, because you have to plan not only for next year but for the year after. Next year’s bloom is secured—unless they winter-kill—in this year’s young plants, growing since spring, or even since the fall before. These I transplant for next summer’s beauty. But for the year after I like to take double precautions. Already I have tiny seedlings, started since August, but besides these I sow seed, too late to start before spring. For a severe winter may do havoc, and I shall then need the early start given by fall sowing.As I work on, I discover all sorts of treasures—young plants, seedlings from all the big-folk of my garden. Young larkspurs surround the bushy parent clumps, and the ground near the forget-me-nots is fairly carpeted with little new ones. I have found that, though the old forget-me-nots will live through, it pays to pull out the most ragged of them and trust to the youngsters to fill[pg 091]their places. These, and English daisies, I let grow together about as they will. They are pretty together, with their mingling of pink, white, and blue, they never run out, and all I need is to keep them from spreading too far, or from crowding each other too much.When my back aches from this kind of sorting and shifting, I straighten up and look about me again. Ah! The phlox! Time now to attend to that!My white phlox is really the most distinguished thing in my garden. I have pink and lavender, too, but any one can have pink and lavender by ordering them from a florist. They can have white, too, but not my white. For mine never saw a florist; it is an inheritance.Sixty or seventy years ago there was a beautiful little garden north of the old house tended and loved by a beautiful lady. The lady died, and the garden did not long outlive her. Its place was taken by a crab-apple orchard, which flourished, bore blossom and fruit, until in its turn it grew old, while the garden had faded to a dim tradition. But one day in August, a few years ago, I discovered[pg 092]under the shade of an old crab tree, two slender sprays of white phlox, trying to blossom. In memory of that old garden and its lady, I took them up and cherished them. And the miracle of life was again made manifest. For from those two little half-starved roots has come the most splendid part of my garden. All summer it makes a thick green wall on the garden’s edge, beside the flagged path. In the other beds it rises in luxuriant masses, giving background and body with its wonderful deep green foliage, which is greener and thicker than any other phlox I know. And when its season to bloom arrives—a long month, from early August to mid-September—it is a glory of whiteness, the tallest sprays on a level with my eyes, the shortest shoulder high, except when rain weighs down the heavy heads and they lean across the paths barring my passage with their fragrant wetness.Here and there I have let the pink and lavender phlox come in, for they begin to bloom two weeks earlier, when the garden needs color. But always my white must dominate. And it does. Most wonderful of[pg 093]all is it on moonlight nights of late August, when it broods over the garden like a white cloud, and the night moths come crowding to its fragrant feast, with their intermittent burring of furry wings.Ah, well! the phlox has passed now, and its trim green leaves are brown and crackly. I can do what I like with it after this. So when my other transplanting grows tiresome, I fall upon my phlox. Every year some of it needs thinning, so quickly does it spread. I take the spading-fork, and, with what seems like utter ruthlessness, I pry out from the thickest centers enough good roots to give the rest breathing and growing space. Along the path edges I always have to cut out encroaching roots each year, or else soon there would be no path. But all that I take out is precious, either to give to friends for their gardens, or to enlarge the edges of my own. For this phlox needs almost no care, and will fight grass and weeds for itself.There are phlox seedlings, too, all over the garden, but I have no way of telling what color they are, though usually I can detect the white by its foliage. I take them up and set[pg 094]them out near the main phlox masses, and wait for the next season’s blossoming before I give them their final place.This is the time of year, too, when I give some attention to the rocks in my garden. Of course, in order to have a garden at all, it was necessary to take out enough rock to build quite a respectable stone wall. But that was not the end. There never will be an end. A Connecticut garden grows rocks like weeds, and one must expect to keep on taking them out each fall. The rest of the year I try to ignore them, but after frost I like to make a fresh raid, and get rid of another wheelbarrow load or so. And I always notice that for one barrow load of stones that go out, it takes at least two barrow loads of earth to fill in. Thus an excellent circulation is maintained, and the garden does not stagnate. Moreover, I take great pleasure in showing my friends—especially friends from the more earthy sections of New York and farther west—the piles of rock and the parts of certain stone walls about the place that have been literally made out of the cullings of my garden. They never believe me.[pg 095]As I am thus occupied,—digging, planting, thinning, sowing,—I find it one of the happiest seasons of the year. It is partly the stimulus of the autumn air, partly the pleasure of getting at the ground. I think there are some of us, city folk though we be, who must have the giant Antæus for ancestor. We still need to get in close touch with the earth now and then. Children have a true instinct with their love of barefoot play in the dirt, and there are grown folks who still love it—but we call it gardening. The sight and the feel and the smell of my brown garden beds gives me a pleasure that is very deep and probably very primitive.But there is another source of pleasure in my fall gardening—a pleasure not of the senses but of the imagination.For as I do my work my fancy is active. As I transplant my young hollyhocks, I see them, not little round-leaved bunches in my hand, but tall and stately, aflare with colors—yellows, whites, pinks. As I dig about my larkspur and stake out its seedlings, they spire above me in heavenly blues. As I arrange the clumps of coarse-leaved young[pg 096]foxgloves, I seem to see their rich tower-like clusters of old-pink bells bending always a little towards the southeast, where most sun comes from. As I thin my forget-me-not I see it—in my mind’s eye—in a blue mist of spring bloom. Thus, a garden rises in my fancy, a garden where neither beetle, borer, nor cutworm doth corrupt, and where the mole doth not break in or steal, where gentle rain and blessed sun come as they are needed, where all the flowers bloom unceasingly in colors of heavenly light—a garden such as never yet existed nor ever shall, till the tales of fairyland come true. I shall never see that garden, yet every year it blooms for me afresh—after frost.

It is late afternoon in mid-September. I stand in my garden sniffing the raw air, and wondering, as always at this season,willthere be frost to-night or will there not? Of course if I were a woodchuck or a muskrat, or any other really intelligent creature, I should know at once and act accordingly, but being only a stupid human being, I am thrown back on conjecture, assisted by the thermometer, and an appeal to Jonathan.

“Too much wind for frost,”says he.

“Sure? I’d hate to lose my nasturtiums quite so early.”

“You won’t lose ’em. Look at the thermometer if you don’t believe me. If it’s above forty you’re safe.”

I look, and try to feel reassured. But I am not quite easy in my mind until next morning when, running out before breakfast, I make the rounds and find everything untouched.

But a few days later the alarm comes again. There is no wind this time, and, what is worse, an ominous silence falls at dusk over the orchard and meadow.“Why is everything so still?”I ask myself.“Oh, of course—the katydids aren’t talking—and the crickets, and all the other whirr-y things. Ah! That means business! My poor garden!”

“Jonathan!”I call, as I feel rather than see his shape whirling noiselessly in at the big gate after his ride up from the station.“Help me cover my nasturtiums. There’ll be frost to-night.”

“Maybe,”says Jonathan’s voice.

“Not maybe at all—surely. Listen to the katydids!”

“You mean, listen to the absence of katydids.”

“Very well. The point is, I want newspapers.”

“No. The point is, I am to bring newspapers.”

“Exactly.”

“And tuck up your nasturtiums for the night in your peculiarly ridiculous fashion—”

“I know it looks ridiculous, but really it’s sensible. There may be weeks of summer after this.”

And so the nasturtiums are tucked up, cozily hidden under the big layers of sheets, whose corners we fasten down with stones. To be sure, the gardenisrather a funny sight, with these pale shapes sprawling over its beds. But it pays. For in the morning, though over in the vegetable garden the squash leaves and lima beans are blackened and limp, my nasturtiums are still pert and crisp. I pull off the papers, wondering what the passers-by have thought, and lo! my gay garden, good for perhaps two weeks more!

But a day arrives when even newspaper coddling is of no avail. Sometimes it is in late September, sometimes not until October, but when it comes there is no resisting.

The sun goes down, leaving a clear sky paling to green at the horizon. A still cold falls upon the world, and I feel that it is the end. Shears in hand, I cut everything I can—nasturtiums down to the ground,—leaves, buds, and all,—feathery sprays of cosmos, asters by the armful. Those last[pg 086]bouquets that I bring into the house are always the most beautiful, for I do not have to save buds for later cutting. There will, alas, be no later cutting.

So I fill my bowls and vases, and next morning I go out, well knowing what I shall see. It is a beautiful sight, too, if one can forget its meaning. The whole golden-green world of autumn has been touched with silver. In the low-lying swamp beyond the orchard it is almost like a light snowfall. The meadows rising beyond the barns are silvered over wherever the long tree-shadows still lie. And in my garden, too, where the shadows linger, every leaf is frosted, but as soon as the sun warms them through, leaf and twig turn dark and droop to the ground. It is the end.

Except, indeed, for my brave marigolds and calendulas and little button asters. It is for this reason that I have given them space all summer, nipping them back when they tried to blossom early, for they seem a bit crude compared with the other flowers. But now that frost is here, my feelings warm to them. I cannot criticize their color and texture,[pg 087]so grateful am I to them for not giving up. And when last night’s cuttings have faded, I shall be very glad of a glowing mass of marigold beside my fireplace, and of the yellow stars of calendula, like embodied sunshine, on my dining-table.

Well, then, the frost has come! And after the first pang of realization, I find that, curiously enough, the worst is over. Since it has come, let it come! And now—hurrah for the garden house-cleaning! The garden is dead—the garden of yesterday! Long live the garden—the garden of to-morrow! For suddenly my mind has leaped ahead to spring.

I can hardly wait for breakfast to be over, before I am out in working clothes, pulling up things—not weeds now, but flowers, or what were flowers. Nasturtiums, asters, cosmos, snapdragon, stock, late-blooming cornflowers—up they all come, all the annuals, and the biennials that have had their season. I fling them together in piles, and soon have small haystacks all along my grass paths, and—there I am! Down again to the good brown earth!

It is with positive satisfaction that I stand[pg 088]and survey my beds, great bare patches of earth, glorified here and there by low clumps of calendula and great bushes of marigold. Now, then! I can do anything! I can dig, and fertilize, and transplant. Best of all, I can plan and plan! The crisp wind stings my cheeks, but as I work I feel the sun hot on the back of my neck. I get the smell of the earth as I turn it over, mingled with the pungent tang of marigold blossoms, very pleasant out of doors, though almost too strong for the house except near a fireplace. I believe the most characteristic fall odors are to me this of marigold, mingled with the fragrance of apples piled in the orchard, the good smell of earth newly turned up, and the flavor of burning leaves, borne now and then on the wind, from the outdoor house-cleaning of the world.

There is perhaps no season of all the garden year that brings more real delight to the gardener, no time so stimulating to the imagination. This year in the garden has been good, but next year shall be better. All the failures, or near-failures, shall of course be turned into successes, and the successes shall[pg 089]be bettered. Last year there were not quite enough hollyhocks, but next year there shall be such glories! There are seedlings that I have been saving, over on the edge of the phlox. I dash across to look them up—yes, here they are, splendid little fellows, leaves only a bit crumpled by the frost. I dig them up carefully, keeping earth packed about their roots, and one by one I convey them across and set them out in a beautiful row where I want them to grow next year. Their place is beside the old stone-flagged path, and I picture them rising tall against the side of the woodshed, whose barrenness I have besides more than half covered with honeysuckle.

Then, there are my foxgloves. Some of them I have already transplanted, but not all. There is a little corner full of stocky yearlings that I must change now. And that same corner can be used for poppies. I have kept seeds of this year’s poppies—funny little brown pepper-shakers, with tiny holes at the end through which I shake out the fine seed dust. Doubtless they would attend to all this without my help, but I like to be sure[pg 090]that even my self-seeding annuals come up where I most want them.

Biennials, like the foxglove and canterbury bells, are of course, the difficult children of the garden, because you have to plan not only for next year but for the year after. Next year’s bloom is secured—unless they winter-kill—in this year’s young plants, growing since spring, or even since the fall before. These I transplant for next summer’s beauty. But for the year after I like to take double precautions. Already I have tiny seedlings, started since August, but besides these I sow seed, too late to start before spring. For a severe winter may do havoc, and I shall then need the early start given by fall sowing.

As I work on, I discover all sorts of treasures—young plants, seedlings from all the big-folk of my garden. Young larkspurs surround the bushy parent clumps, and the ground near the forget-me-nots is fairly carpeted with little new ones. I have found that, though the old forget-me-nots will live through, it pays to pull out the most ragged of them and trust to the youngsters to fill[pg 091]their places. These, and English daisies, I let grow together about as they will. They are pretty together, with their mingling of pink, white, and blue, they never run out, and all I need is to keep them from spreading too far, or from crowding each other too much.

When my back aches from this kind of sorting and shifting, I straighten up and look about me again. Ah! The phlox! Time now to attend to that!

My white phlox is really the most distinguished thing in my garden. I have pink and lavender, too, but any one can have pink and lavender by ordering them from a florist. They can have white, too, but not my white. For mine never saw a florist; it is an inheritance.

Sixty or seventy years ago there was a beautiful little garden north of the old house tended and loved by a beautiful lady. The lady died, and the garden did not long outlive her. Its place was taken by a crab-apple orchard, which flourished, bore blossom and fruit, until in its turn it grew old, while the garden had faded to a dim tradition. But one day in August, a few years ago, I discovered[pg 092]under the shade of an old crab tree, two slender sprays of white phlox, trying to blossom. In memory of that old garden and its lady, I took them up and cherished them. And the miracle of life was again made manifest. For from those two little half-starved roots has come the most splendid part of my garden. All summer it makes a thick green wall on the garden’s edge, beside the flagged path. In the other beds it rises in luxuriant masses, giving background and body with its wonderful deep green foliage, which is greener and thicker than any other phlox I know. And when its season to bloom arrives—a long month, from early August to mid-September—it is a glory of whiteness, the tallest sprays on a level with my eyes, the shortest shoulder high, except when rain weighs down the heavy heads and they lean across the paths barring my passage with their fragrant wetness.

Here and there I have let the pink and lavender phlox come in, for they begin to bloom two weeks earlier, when the garden needs color. But always my white must dominate. And it does. Most wonderful of[pg 093]all is it on moonlight nights of late August, when it broods over the garden like a white cloud, and the night moths come crowding to its fragrant feast, with their intermittent burring of furry wings.

Ah, well! the phlox has passed now, and its trim green leaves are brown and crackly. I can do what I like with it after this. So when my other transplanting grows tiresome, I fall upon my phlox. Every year some of it needs thinning, so quickly does it spread. I take the spading-fork, and, with what seems like utter ruthlessness, I pry out from the thickest centers enough good roots to give the rest breathing and growing space. Along the path edges I always have to cut out encroaching roots each year, or else soon there would be no path. But all that I take out is precious, either to give to friends for their gardens, or to enlarge the edges of my own. For this phlox needs almost no care, and will fight grass and weeds for itself.

There are phlox seedlings, too, all over the garden, but I have no way of telling what color they are, though usually I can detect the white by its foliage. I take them up and set[pg 094]them out near the main phlox masses, and wait for the next season’s blossoming before I give them their final place.

This is the time of year, too, when I give some attention to the rocks in my garden. Of course, in order to have a garden at all, it was necessary to take out enough rock to build quite a respectable stone wall. But that was not the end. There never will be an end. A Connecticut garden grows rocks like weeds, and one must expect to keep on taking them out each fall. The rest of the year I try to ignore them, but after frost I like to make a fresh raid, and get rid of another wheelbarrow load or so. And I always notice that for one barrow load of stones that go out, it takes at least two barrow loads of earth to fill in. Thus an excellent circulation is maintained, and the garden does not stagnate. Moreover, I take great pleasure in showing my friends—especially friends from the more earthy sections of New York and farther west—the piles of rock and the parts of certain stone walls about the place that have been literally made out of the cullings of my garden. They never believe me.

As I am thus occupied,—digging, planting, thinning, sowing,—I find it one of the happiest seasons of the year. It is partly the stimulus of the autumn air, partly the pleasure of getting at the ground. I think there are some of us, city folk though we be, who must have the giant Antæus for ancestor. We still need to get in close touch with the earth now and then. Children have a true instinct with their love of barefoot play in the dirt, and there are grown folks who still love it—but we call it gardening. The sight and the feel and the smell of my brown garden beds gives me a pleasure that is very deep and probably very primitive.

But there is another source of pleasure in my fall gardening—a pleasure not of the senses but of the imagination.

For as I do my work my fancy is active. As I transplant my young hollyhocks, I see them, not little round-leaved bunches in my hand, but tall and stately, aflare with colors—yellows, whites, pinks. As I dig about my larkspur and stake out its seedlings, they spire above me in heavenly blues. As I arrange the clumps of coarse-leaved young[pg 096]foxgloves, I seem to see their rich tower-like clusters of old-pink bells bending always a little towards the southeast, where most sun comes from. As I thin my forget-me-not I see it—in my mind’s eye—in a blue mist of spring bloom. Thus, a garden rises in my fancy, a garden where neither beetle, borer, nor cutworm doth corrupt, and where the mole doth not break in or steal, where gentle rain and blessed sun come as they are needed, where all the flowers bloom unceasingly in colors of heavenly light—a garden such as never yet existed nor ever shall, till the tales of fairyland come true. I shall never see that garden, yet every year it blooms for me afresh—after frost.

[pg 097]VThe Joys of Garden StewardshipI sometimes think I am coming to classify my friends according to the way they act when I talk about my garden. On this basis, there are three sorts of people.First there are those who are obviously not interested. Such as these feel no answering thrill, even at the sight of a florist’s spring catalogue. A weed inspires in them no desire to pull it. They may, however, be really nice people if they are still young; for, except by special grace, no one under thirty need be expected to care about gardens—it is a mature taste. But in the mean time I turn our talk in other channels.Then there are the people who, when I approach the subject, brighten up, look intelligent, even eager, but in a moment make it clear that what they are eager for is a chance to talk about their own gardens. Mine is merely the stepping-stone, the bridge,[pg 098]the handle. This is better than indifference, yet it is sometimes trying. One of my dearest friends thus tests my love now and then when she walks in my garden.“Aren’t those peonies lovely?”I suggest.“Yes,”dreamily;“you know I can’t have that shade in my garden because—”and she trails off into a disquisition that I could, just at that moment, do without.“Look at the height of that larkspur!”I say.“Yes—but, you know, it wouldn’t do for me to have larkspur when I go away so early. What I need is things for April and May.”“Well, I am not trying tosellyou any,”I am sometimes goaded into protesting.“I only wanted you to say they are pretty—pretty right here inmygarden.”“Yes—yes—of course they are pretty—they’re lovely—you have a lovely garden, you know.”She pulls herself up to give this tribute, but soon her eyes get the faraway look in them again, and she is murmuring,“Oh, I must write Edward to see about that hedge. Tell me, my dear, if you had a brick wall, would you have vines on it or wall-fruit?”[pg 099]It is of no use. I cannot hold her long. I sometimes think she was nicer when she had no garden of her own. Perhaps she thinks I was nicer when I had none.But there is another kind of garden manners—a kind that subtly soothes, cheers, perhaps inebriates. It is the manner of the friend who may, indeed, have a garden, but who looks at mine with the eye of adoption, temporarily at least. She walks down its paths, singling out this or that for notice. She suggests, she even criticizes, tenderly, as one who tells you an“evenmorebecoming way”to arrange your little daughter’s hair. She offers you roots and seeds and seedlings from her garden, and—last touch of flattery—she begs seeds and seedlings from yours.For garden purposes, give me the manners of this third class. And, indeed, not for garden purposes alone. They are useful as applied to many things—children, particularly, and houses.Undoubtedly the demand that I make upon my friends is a form of vanity, yet I cannot seem to feel ashamed of it. I admit at once that not the least part of my pleasure in[pg 100]my flowers is the attention they get from others. Moreover, it is not only from friends that I seek this, but from every passer-by along my country road. There are gardens and gardens. Some, set about with hedges tall and thick, offer the delights of exclusiveness and solitude. But exclusiveness and solitude are easily had on a Connecticut farm, and my garden will none of them; it flings forth its appeal to every wayfarer. And I like it. I like my garden to“get notice.”As people drive by I hope they enjoy my phlox. I furtively glance to see if they have an eye for the foxglove. I wonder if the calendulas are so tall that they hide the asters. And if, as I bend over my weeding, an automobile whirling past lets fly an appreciative phrase—“lovely flowers—”“wonderful yellow of—”“garden there,”—my ears are quick to receive it and I forgive the eddies of gasolene and dust that are also left by the vanishing visitant.About few things can one be so brazen in one’s enjoyment of recognition. One’s house, one’s clothes, one’s work, one’s children, all these demand a certain modesty of demeanor,[pg 101]however the inner spirit may puff. Not so one’s garden. I fancy this is because, while I have a strong sense of ownership in it, I also have a strong sense of stewardship. As owner I must be modest, but as steward I may admire as openly as I will. Did I make my phlox? Did I fashion my asters? Am I the artificer of my fringed larkspur? Nay, truly, I am but their caretaker, and may glory in them as well as another, only with the added touch of joy that I, even I, have given them their opportunity. Like Paul I plant, like Apollos I water, but before the power that giveth the increase I stand back and wonder.But it is not alone the results of my stewardship that give me joy. Its very processes are good. Delight in the earth is a primitive instinct. Digging is naturally pleasant, hoeing is pleasant, raking is pleasant, and then there is the weeding. For I am not the only one who sows seeds in my garden. One of my friends remarked cheerfully that he had planted twenty-seven different vegetables in his garden, and the Lord had planted two hundred and twenty-seven other kinds of things.[pg 102]This is where the weeding comes in. Now a good deal has been said about the labor of weeding, but little about the gratifications of weeding. I don’t mean weeding with a hoe. I mean yanking up, with movements suited to the occasion, each individual growing thing that doesn’t belong. Surely I am not the only one to have felt the pleasure of this. They come up so nicely, and leave such soft earth behind! And intellect is needed, too, for each weed demands its own way of handling: the adherent plantain needing a slow, firm, drawing motion, but very satisfactory when it comes; the evasive clover requiring that all its sprawling runners shall be gathered up in one gentle, tactful pull; the tender shepherd’s purse coming easily on a straight twitch; the tough ragweed that yields to almost any kind of jerk. Even witch-grass, the bane of the farmer, has its rewarding side, when one really does get out its handful of wicked-looking, crawly, white tubers.Weeding is most fun when the weeds are not too small. Yes, from the aspect of a sport there is something to be said for letting weeds grow. Pulling out little tender ones is poor[pg 103]work compared with the satisfaction of hauling up a spreading treelet of ragweed or a far-flaunting wild buckwheat. You seem to get so much for your effort, and it stirs up the ground so, and no other weeds have grown under the shade of the big one, so its departure leaves a good bit of empty brown earth.Surely, weeding is good fun. If faults could be yanked out of children in the same entertaining way, the orphan asylums would soon be emptied through the craze for adoption as a major sport.One of the pleasantest mornings of my life was spent weeding, in the rain, a long-neglected corner of my garden, while a young friend stood around the edges and explained the current political situation to me, and carted away armfuls of green stuff as I handed them out to him. The rain drizzled, and the air was fragrant with the smell of wet earth and bruised stems. Ideally, of course, weeds should never reach this state of sportive rankness. But most of my friends admit, under pressure, that there are corners where such things do happen.[pg 104]Naturally, all this is assuming that one is one’s own gardener. There may be pleasure in having a garden kept up by a real gardener, but that always seems to me a little like having a doll and letting somebody else dress and undress it. My garden must never grow so big that I cannot take care of it—and neglect it—myself.In saying this, however, I don’t count rocks. When it comes to rocks, I call in Jonathan. And it often comes to rocks.For mine is a Connecticut garden. Now in the beginning Connecticut was composed entirely of rocks. Then the little earth gnomes, fearing that no one would ever come there to give them sport, sprinkled a little earth amongst the rocks, partly covered some, wholly covered others, and then hid to see what the gardeners would do about it. And ever since the gardeners have been patiently, or impatiently, tucking in their seeds and plants in the thimblefuls of earth left by the gnomes. They have been picking out the rocks, or blowing them up, or burying them, or working around them; and every winter the little gnomes gather and push up a new[pg 105]lot from the dark storehouses of the underworld. In the spring the gardeners begin again, and the little gnomes hold their sides with still laughter to watch the work go on.“Rocks?”my friends say.“Do you mind the rocks? But they are a special beauty! Why, I have a rock in my garden that I have treated—”“Very well,”I interrupt rudely.“A rockis all very well. If I hada rockin my garden I could treat it, too. But how about a garden that is all rocks?”“Oh—why—choose another spot.”Whereupon I reply,“You don’t know Connecticut.”Ever since I began having a garden I have had my troubles with the rocks, but the worst time came when, in a mood of enthusiastic and absolutely unintelligent optimism, I decided to have a bit of smooth grass in the middle of my garden. I wanted it very much. The place was too restless; you couldn’t sit down anywhere. I felt that I had to have a clear green spot where I could take a chair and a book. I selected the spot, marked it off with string, and began to loosen up the earth[pg 106]for a late summer planting of grass seed. Calendulas and poppies and cornflowers had bloomed there before, self-sown and able to look out for themselves, so I had never investigated the depths of the bed to see what the little gnomes had prepared for me. Now I found out. The spading-fork gave a familiar dull clink as it struck rock. I felt about for the edge; it was a big one. I got the crowbar and dropped it, in testing prods; it was averybig one, and only four inches below the surface. Grass would never grow there in a dry season. I moved to another part. Another rock, big too! I prodded all over the allotted space, and found six big fellows lurking just below the top of the soil. Evidently it was a case for calling in Jonathan.He came, grumbling a little, as a man should, but very efficient, armed with two crowbars and equipped with a natural genius for manipulating rocks. He made a few well-placed remarks about queer people who choose to have grass where flowers would grow, and flowers where grass would grow, also about Connecticut being intended for a quarry and not for a garden anyhow. But all[pg 107]this was only the necessary accompaniment of the crowbar-play. Soon, under the insistent and canny urgency of the bars, a big rock began to heave its shoulder into sight above the soil. I hovered about, chucking in stones and earth underneath, placing little rocks under the bar for fulcrums, pulling them out again when they were no longer needed, standing guard over the flowers in the rest of the garden, with repeated warnings.“Please, Jonathan, don’t step back any farther; you’ll trample the forget-me-nots!”“Couldyou manage to roll this fellow out along that path and not across the mangled bodies of the marigolds?”Jonathan grumbled a little about being expected to pick a half-ton pebble out of the garden with his fingers, or lead it out with a string.“Oh, well, of course, if youcan’tdo it I’ll have to let the marigolds go this year. But you do such wonderful things with a crowbar, I thought you could probably just guide it a little.”And Jonathan responds nobly to the flattery of this remark, and does indeed guide the huge thing, eases it along the narrow path, grazes the marigolds but leaves them[pg 108]unhurt, until at last, with a careful arrangement of stone fulcrums and a skillful twist of the bars, the great rock makes its last response and lunges heavily past the last flower bed on to the grass beyond.When the work was done, the edge of the garden looked like Stonehenge, and the spot where my grass was to be was nothing but a yawning pit, crying to be filled. We surveyed it with interest.“If we had a water-supply, I wouldn’t make a grass-plot,”I said;“I’d make a swimming-pool. It’s deep enough.”“And sit in the middle with your book?”asked Jonathan.But there was no water-supply, so we filled it in with earth. Thirty wheelbarrow loads went in where those rocks came out. And the little gnomes perched on Stonehenge and jeered the while. I photographed it, and the rocks“took”well, but as regards the gnomes, the film was underexposed.Thus the grass seed was planted. And we reminded each other of the version of“America”once given, with unconscious inspiration, by a little friend of ours:—[pg 109]“Land where our father died,Land where the pilgrims pried.”It seemed to us to suit the adventure.As I have said, I love to have my friends love my garden. But there is one thing about it that I find does not always appeal to them pleasantly, and that is its color-schemes. Yet this is not my doing. For in nothing do I feel more keenly the fact of my mere stewardship than in this matter of color-scheme.I set out with a very rigid one. I was quite decided in my own mind that what I wanted was white and salmon-pink and lavender. Asters, phlox, sweet peas, hollyhocks, all were to bend themselves to my rules. At first affairs went very well. White was easy. White phlox I had, and have—an inheritance—which from a few roots is spreading and spreading in waves of whiteness that grow more luxuriant every year. But I bought roots of salmon-pink and lavender, and then my troubles commenced. About the third season strange things began to happen. The pink phlox had the strength of ten. It spread amazingly; but it forgot all about my rules. It degenerated, some of it—reverted[pg 110]toward that magenta shade that nature seems so naturally to adore in the vegetable world. To my horror I found my garden blossoming into magenta pink, blue pink, crimson, cardinal—all the colors I had determined not under any circumstances to admit. On the other hand, the lavender phlox, which I particularly wanted, was most lovely, but frail. It refused to spread. It effaced itself before the rampant pink and its magenta-tainted brood. I vowed I would pull out the magentas, but each year my courage failed. They bloomed so bravely; I would wait till they were through. But by that time I was not quite sure which was which; I might pull out the wrong ones. And so I hesitated.Moreover, I discovered, lingering among the flowers at dusk, that there were certain colors, most unpleasant by daylight, which at that time took on a new shade, and, for perhaps half an hour before night fell, were richly lovely. This is true of some of the magentas, which at dusk turn suddenly to royal purples and deep lavender-blues that are wonderfully satisfying.[pg 111]For that half-hour of beauty I spare them. While the sun shines I try to look the other way, and at twilight I linger near them and enjoy their strange, dim glories, born literally of the magic hour. But I have trouble explaining them, by daylight, to some of my visitors who like color-schemes.Insubordination is contagious. And I found after a while that my asters were not running true; queer things were happening among the sweet peas, and in the ranks of the hollyhocks all was not as it should be. And the last charge was made upon me by the children’s gardens. Children know not color-schemes. What they demand is flowers, flowers—flowers to pick and pick, flowers to do things with. Snapdragon, for instance, is a jolly playmate, and little fingers love to pinch its cheeks and see its jaws yawn wide. But snapdragon tends dangerously toward the magenta. Then there was the calendula—a delight to the young, because it blooms incessantly long past the early frosts, and has brittle stems that yield themselves to the clumsiest plucking by small hands. But calendula ranges from a faded yellow, through[pg 112]really pretty primrose shades, to a deep red-orange touched with maroon.And, finally, there was the portulaca. Children love it, perhaps, best of all. It offers them fresh blossoms and new colors each morning, and it is even more easy to pick than the calendula. Who would deny them portulaca? Yet if this be admitted, one may as well give up the battle. For, as we all know, there is absolutely no color, except green, that portulaca does not perpetrate in its blossoms. It knows no shame.In short, I am giving up. I am beginning to say with conviction that color-schemes are the mark of a narrow and rigid taste—that they are born of convention and are meant not for living things but for wall-papers and portières and clothes. Moreover, I am really growing callous—or is it, rather, broad? Colors in my garden that would once have made my teeth ache now leave them feeling perfectly comfortable. I find myself looking with unmoved flesh—no creeps nor withdrawals—upon a bed of mixed magentas, scarlets, rose-pinks, and yellow-pinks. I even look with pleasure. I begin to think there[pg 113]may be a point beyond which discord achieves a higher harmony. At least, this sounds well. But, again, I find it hard to explain to some of my friends.Indoors, it is another story. When I bring in the spoils of the garden I am again mistress and bend all to my will. Here I’ll have no tricks of color played on me. Sunshine and sky, perhaps, work some spell, for as soon as I get within four walls my prejudices return; scarlets and crimsons and pinks have to live in different rooms. I must have my color-schemes again, and perhaps I am as narrow as the worst. Except, indeed, for the children’s bowls; here the pink and the magenta, the lamb and the lion, may lie down together. But it takes a little child to lead them.* * * * *Out in my garden I feel myself less and less owner, more and more merely steward. I decree certain paths, and the phlox says,“Paths? Did you say paths?”and obliterates them in a season’s growth, so that children walk by faith and not by sight. I decree iris in one corner, and the primroses say,“Iris? Not at all. This is our bed. Iris indeed!”[pg 114]And I submit, and move the iris elsewhere.And yet this slipping of responsibility is pleasant, too. So long as my garden will let me dig in it and weed it and pick it, so long as it entertains my friends for me, so long as it tosses up an occasional rock so that Jonathan does not lose all interest in it, so long as it plays prettily with the children and flings gay greetings to every passer-by, I can find no fault with it.The joys of stewardship are great and I am well content.

I sometimes think I am coming to classify my friends according to the way they act when I talk about my garden. On this basis, there are three sorts of people.

First there are those who are obviously not interested. Such as these feel no answering thrill, even at the sight of a florist’s spring catalogue. A weed inspires in them no desire to pull it. They may, however, be really nice people if they are still young; for, except by special grace, no one under thirty need be expected to care about gardens—it is a mature taste. But in the mean time I turn our talk in other channels.

Then there are the people who, when I approach the subject, brighten up, look intelligent, even eager, but in a moment make it clear that what they are eager for is a chance to talk about their own gardens. Mine is merely the stepping-stone, the bridge,[pg 098]the handle. This is better than indifference, yet it is sometimes trying. One of my dearest friends thus tests my love now and then when she walks in my garden.

“Aren’t those peonies lovely?”I suggest.

“Yes,”dreamily;“you know I can’t have that shade in my garden because—”and she trails off into a disquisition that I could, just at that moment, do without.

“Look at the height of that larkspur!”I say.

“Yes—but, you know, it wouldn’t do for me to have larkspur when I go away so early. What I need is things for April and May.”

“Well, I am not trying tosellyou any,”I am sometimes goaded into protesting.“I only wanted you to say they are pretty—pretty right here inmygarden.”

“Yes—yes—of course they are pretty—they’re lovely—you have a lovely garden, you know.”She pulls herself up to give this tribute, but soon her eyes get the faraway look in them again, and she is murmuring,“Oh, I must write Edward to see about that hedge. Tell me, my dear, if you had a brick wall, would you have vines on it or wall-fruit?”

It is of no use. I cannot hold her long. I sometimes think she was nicer when she had no garden of her own. Perhaps she thinks I was nicer when I had none.

But there is another kind of garden manners—a kind that subtly soothes, cheers, perhaps inebriates. It is the manner of the friend who may, indeed, have a garden, but who looks at mine with the eye of adoption, temporarily at least. She walks down its paths, singling out this or that for notice. She suggests, she even criticizes, tenderly, as one who tells you an“evenmorebecoming way”to arrange your little daughter’s hair. She offers you roots and seeds and seedlings from her garden, and—last touch of flattery—she begs seeds and seedlings from yours.

For garden purposes, give me the manners of this third class. And, indeed, not for garden purposes alone. They are useful as applied to many things—children, particularly, and houses.

Undoubtedly the demand that I make upon my friends is a form of vanity, yet I cannot seem to feel ashamed of it. I admit at once that not the least part of my pleasure in[pg 100]my flowers is the attention they get from others. Moreover, it is not only from friends that I seek this, but from every passer-by along my country road. There are gardens and gardens. Some, set about with hedges tall and thick, offer the delights of exclusiveness and solitude. But exclusiveness and solitude are easily had on a Connecticut farm, and my garden will none of them; it flings forth its appeal to every wayfarer. And I like it. I like my garden to“get notice.”As people drive by I hope they enjoy my phlox. I furtively glance to see if they have an eye for the foxglove. I wonder if the calendulas are so tall that they hide the asters. And if, as I bend over my weeding, an automobile whirling past lets fly an appreciative phrase—“lovely flowers—”“wonderful yellow of—”“garden there,”—my ears are quick to receive it and I forgive the eddies of gasolene and dust that are also left by the vanishing visitant.

About few things can one be so brazen in one’s enjoyment of recognition. One’s house, one’s clothes, one’s work, one’s children, all these demand a certain modesty of demeanor,[pg 101]however the inner spirit may puff. Not so one’s garden. I fancy this is because, while I have a strong sense of ownership in it, I also have a strong sense of stewardship. As owner I must be modest, but as steward I may admire as openly as I will. Did I make my phlox? Did I fashion my asters? Am I the artificer of my fringed larkspur? Nay, truly, I am but their caretaker, and may glory in them as well as another, only with the added touch of joy that I, even I, have given them their opportunity. Like Paul I plant, like Apollos I water, but before the power that giveth the increase I stand back and wonder.

But it is not alone the results of my stewardship that give me joy. Its very processes are good. Delight in the earth is a primitive instinct. Digging is naturally pleasant, hoeing is pleasant, raking is pleasant, and then there is the weeding. For I am not the only one who sows seeds in my garden. One of my friends remarked cheerfully that he had planted twenty-seven different vegetables in his garden, and the Lord had planted two hundred and twenty-seven other kinds of things.

This is where the weeding comes in. Now a good deal has been said about the labor of weeding, but little about the gratifications of weeding. I don’t mean weeding with a hoe. I mean yanking up, with movements suited to the occasion, each individual growing thing that doesn’t belong. Surely I am not the only one to have felt the pleasure of this. They come up so nicely, and leave such soft earth behind! And intellect is needed, too, for each weed demands its own way of handling: the adherent plantain needing a slow, firm, drawing motion, but very satisfactory when it comes; the evasive clover requiring that all its sprawling runners shall be gathered up in one gentle, tactful pull; the tender shepherd’s purse coming easily on a straight twitch; the tough ragweed that yields to almost any kind of jerk. Even witch-grass, the bane of the farmer, has its rewarding side, when one really does get out its handful of wicked-looking, crawly, white tubers.

Weeding is most fun when the weeds are not too small. Yes, from the aspect of a sport there is something to be said for letting weeds grow. Pulling out little tender ones is poor[pg 103]work compared with the satisfaction of hauling up a spreading treelet of ragweed or a far-flaunting wild buckwheat. You seem to get so much for your effort, and it stirs up the ground so, and no other weeds have grown under the shade of the big one, so its departure leaves a good bit of empty brown earth.

Surely, weeding is good fun. If faults could be yanked out of children in the same entertaining way, the orphan asylums would soon be emptied through the craze for adoption as a major sport.

One of the pleasantest mornings of my life was spent weeding, in the rain, a long-neglected corner of my garden, while a young friend stood around the edges and explained the current political situation to me, and carted away armfuls of green stuff as I handed them out to him. The rain drizzled, and the air was fragrant with the smell of wet earth and bruised stems. Ideally, of course, weeds should never reach this state of sportive rankness. But most of my friends admit, under pressure, that there are corners where such things do happen.

Naturally, all this is assuming that one is one’s own gardener. There may be pleasure in having a garden kept up by a real gardener, but that always seems to me a little like having a doll and letting somebody else dress and undress it. My garden must never grow so big that I cannot take care of it—and neglect it—myself.

In saying this, however, I don’t count rocks. When it comes to rocks, I call in Jonathan. And it often comes to rocks.

For mine is a Connecticut garden. Now in the beginning Connecticut was composed entirely of rocks. Then the little earth gnomes, fearing that no one would ever come there to give them sport, sprinkled a little earth amongst the rocks, partly covered some, wholly covered others, and then hid to see what the gardeners would do about it. And ever since the gardeners have been patiently, or impatiently, tucking in their seeds and plants in the thimblefuls of earth left by the gnomes. They have been picking out the rocks, or blowing them up, or burying them, or working around them; and every winter the little gnomes gather and push up a new[pg 105]lot from the dark storehouses of the underworld. In the spring the gardeners begin again, and the little gnomes hold their sides with still laughter to watch the work go on.

“Rocks?”my friends say.“Do you mind the rocks? But they are a special beauty! Why, I have a rock in my garden that I have treated—”

“Very well,”I interrupt rudely.“A rockis all very well. If I hada rockin my garden I could treat it, too. But how about a garden that is all rocks?”

“Oh—why—choose another spot.”

Whereupon I reply,“You don’t know Connecticut.”

Ever since I began having a garden I have had my troubles with the rocks, but the worst time came when, in a mood of enthusiastic and absolutely unintelligent optimism, I decided to have a bit of smooth grass in the middle of my garden. I wanted it very much. The place was too restless; you couldn’t sit down anywhere. I felt that I had to have a clear green spot where I could take a chair and a book. I selected the spot, marked it off with string, and began to loosen up the earth[pg 106]for a late summer planting of grass seed. Calendulas and poppies and cornflowers had bloomed there before, self-sown and able to look out for themselves, so I had never investigated the depths of the bed to see what the little gnomes had prepared for me. Now I found out. The spading-fork gave a familiar dull clink as it struck rock. I felt about for the edge; it was a big one. I got the crowbar and dropped it, in testing prods; it was averybig one, and only four inches below the surface. Grass would never grow there in a dry season. I moved to another part. Another rock, big too! I prodded all over the allotted space, and found six big fellows lurking just below the top of the soil. Evidently it was a case for calling in Jonathan.

He came, grumbling a little, as a man should, but very efficient, armed with two crowbars and equipped with a natural genius for manipulating rocks. He made a few well-placed remarks about queer people who choose to have grass where flowers would grow, and flowers where grass would grow, also about Connecticut being intended for a quarry and not for a garden anyhow. But all[pg 107]this was only the necessary accompaniment of the crowbar-play. Soon, under the insistent and canny urgency of the bars, a big rock began to heave its shoulder into sight above the soil. I hovered about, chucking in stones and earth underneath, placing little rocks under the bar for fulcrums, pulling them out again when they were no longer needed, standing guard over the flowers in the rest of the garden, with repeated warnings.“Please, Jonathan, don’t step back any farther; you’ll trample the forget-me-nots!”“Couldyou manage to roll this fellow out along that path and not across the mangled bodies of the marigolds?”Jonathan grumbled a little about being expected to pick a half-ton pebble out of the garden with his fingers, or lead it out with a string.

“Oh, well, of course, if youcan’tdo it I’ll have to let the marigolds go this year. But you do such wonderful things with a crowbar, I thought you could probably just guide it a little.”And Jonathan responds nobly to the flattery of this remark, and does indeed guide the huge thing, eases it along the narrow path, grazes the marigolds but leaves them[pg 108]unhurt, until at last, with a careful arrangement of stone fulcrums and a skillful twist of the bars, the great rock makes its last response and lunges heavily past the last flower bed on to the grass beyond.

When the work was done, the edge of the garden looked like Stonehenge, and the spot where my grass was to be was nothing but a yawning pit, crying to be filled. We surveyed it with interest.“If we had a water-supply, I wouldn’t make a grass-plot,”I said;“I’d make a swimming-pool. It’s deep enough.”

“And sit in the middle with your book?”asked Jonathan.

But there was no water-supply, so we filled it in with earth. Thirty wheelbarrow loads went in where those rocks came out. And the little gnomes perched on Stonehenge and jeered the while. I photographed it, and the rocks“took”well, but as regards the gnomes, the film was underexposed.

Thus the grass seed was planted. And we reminded each other of the version of“America”once given, with unconscious inspiration, by a little friend of ours:—

“Land where our father died,Land where the pilgrims pried.”

“Land where our father died,

Land where the pilgrims pried.”

It seemed to us to suit the adventure.

As I have said, I love to have my friends love my garden. But there is one thing about it that I find does not always appeal to them pleasantly, and that is its color-schemes. Yet this is not my doing. For in nothing do I feel more keenly the fact of my mere stewardship than in this matter of color-scheme.

I set out with a very rigid one. I was quite decided in my own mind that what I wanted was white and salmon-pink and lavender. Asters, phlox, sweet peas, hollyhocks, all were to bend themselves to my rules. At first affairs went very well. White was easy. White phlox I had, and have—an inheritance—which from a few roots is spreading and spreading in waves of whiteness that grow more luxuriant every year. But I bought roots of salmon-pink and lavender, and then my troubles commenced. About the third season strange things began to happen. The pink phlox had the strength of ten. It spread amazingly; but it forgot all about my rules. It degenerated, some of it—reverted[pg 110]toward that magenta shade that nature seems so naturally to adore in the vegetable world. To my horror I found my garden blossoming into magenta pink, blue pink, crimson, cardinal—all the colors I had determined not under any circumstances to admit. On the other hand, the lavender phlox, which I particularly wanted, was most lovely, but frail. It refused to spread. It effaced itself before the rampant pink and its magenta-tainted brood. I vowed I would pull out the magentas, but each year my courage failed. They bloomed so bravely; I would wait till they were through. But by that time I was not quite sure which was which; I might pull out the wrong ones. And so I hesitated.

Moreover, I discovered, lingering among the flowers at dusk, that there were certain colors, most unpleasant by daylight, which at that time took on a new shade, and, for perhaps half an hour before night fell, were richly lovely. This is true of some of the magentas, which at dusk turn suddenly to royal purples and deep lavender-blues that are wonderfully satisfying.

For that half-hour of beauty I spare them. While the sun shines I try to look the other way, and at twilight I linger near them and enjoy their strange, dim glories, born literally of the magic hour. But I have trouble explaining them, by daylight, to some of my visitors who like color-schemes.

Insubordination is contagious. And I found after a while that my asters were not running true; queer things were happening among the sweet peas, and in the ranks of the hollyhocks all was not as it should be. And the last charge was made upon me by the children’s gardens. Children know not color-schemes. What they demand is flowers, flowers—flowers to pick and pick, flowers to do things with. Snapdragon, for instance, is a jolly playmate, and little fingers love to pinch its cheeks and see its jaws yawn wide. But snapdragon tends dangerously toward the magenta. Then there was the calendula—a delight to the young, because it blooms incessantly long past the early frosts, and has brittle stems that yield themselves to the clumsiest plucking by small hands. But calendula ranges from a faded yellow, through[pg 112]really pretty primrose shades, to a deep red-orange touched with maroon.

And, finally, there was the portulaca. Children love it, perhaps, best of all. It offers them fresh blossoms and new colors each morning, and it is even more easy to pick than the calendula. Who would deny them portulaca? Yet if this be admitted, one may as well give up the battle. For, as we all know, there is absolutely no color, except green, that portulaca does not perpetrate in its blossoms. It knows no shame.

In short, I am giving up. I am beginning to say with conviction that color-schemes are the mark of a narrow and rigid taste—that they are born of convention and are meant not for living things but for wall-papers and portières and clothes. Moreover, I am really growing callous—or is it, rather, broad? Colors in my garden that would once have made my teeth ache now leave them feeling perfectly comfortable. I find myself looking with unmoved flesh—no creeps nor withdrawals—upon a bed of mixed magentas, scarlets, rose-pinks, and yellow-pinks. I even look with pleasure. I begin to think there[pg 113]may be a point beyond which discord achieves a higher harmony. At least, this sounds well. But, again, I find it hard to explain to some of my friends.

Indoors, it is another story. When I bring in the spoils of the garden I am again mistress and bend all to my will. Here I’ll have no tricks of color played on me. Sunshine and sky, perhaps, work some spell, for as soon as I get within four walls my prejudices return; scarlets and crimsons and pinks have to live in different rooms. I must have my color-schemes again, and perhaps I am as narrow as the worst. Except, indeed, for the children’s bowls; here the pink and the magenta, the lamb and the lion, may lie down together. But it takes a little child to lead them.

* * * * *

Out in my garden I feel myself less and less owner, more and more merely steward. I decree certain paths, and the phlox says,“Paths? Did you say paths?”and obliterates them in a season’s growth, so that children walk by faith and not by sight. I decree iris in one corner, and the primroses say,“Iris? Not at all. This is our bed. Iris indeed!”[pg 114]And I submit, and move the iris elsewhere.

And yet this slipping of responsibility is pleasant, too. So long as my garden will let me dig in it and weed it and pick it, so long as it entertains my friends for me, so long as it tosses up an occasional rock so that Jonathan does not lose all interest in it, so long as it plays prettily with the children and flings gay greetings to every passer-by, I can find no fault with it.

The joys of stewardship are great and I am well content.

[pg 115]VITrout and ArbutusEvery year, toward the end of March, I find Jonathan poking about in my sewing-box. And, unless I am very absent-minded, I know what he is after.“No use looking there,”I remark;“I keep my silks put away.”“I want red, and as strong as there is.”“I know what you want. Here.”and I hand him a spool of red buttonhole twist.“Ah! Just right!”And for the rest of the evening his fingers are busy.Over what? Mending our trout-rods, of course. It is pretty work, calling for strength and precision of grasp, and as he winds and winds, adjusting all the little brass leading-rings, or supplying new ones, and staying points in the bamboo where he suspects weakness, we talk over last year’s trout-pools, and wonder what they will be like this year.But beyond wonder we do not get, often for weeks after the trout season is, legislatively,[pg 116]“open.”Jonathan is“busy.”I am“busy.”We know that, if April passes, there is still May and June, and so, if at the end of April, or early May, we do at last pick up our rods,—all new-bedight with red silk windings, and shiny with fresh varnish,—it is not alone the call of the trout that decides us, but another call which is to me at least more imperious, because, if we neglect it now, there is no May and June in which to heed it. It is the call of the arbutus.Any one with New England traditions knows what this call is. Its appeal is to something far deeper than the love of a pretty flower. For it is the flower that, to our fathers and our grandfathers, and to their fathers and grandfathers, meant spring; and not spring in its prettiness and ease, appealing to the idler in us, nor spring in its melancholy, appealing to—shall I say the poet in us? But spring in its blessedness of opportunity, its joyously triumphant life, appealing to the worker in us. Here, of course, we touch hands with all the races of the world for whom winter has been the supreme menace, spring the supreme and saving miracle. But each race has its own[pg 117]symbols, and to the New Englander the symbol is the arbutus.This may seem a bit of sentimentality. And, indeed, we need not expect to find it expressed by any New England farmer. New England does not go out in gay companies to bring back the first blossoms. But New England does nothing in gay companies. It has been taught to distrust ceremonies and expression of any sort. It rejoices with reticence, it appreciates with a reservation. And yet I have seen a sprig of arbutus in rough and clumsy buttonholes on weather-faded lapels which, the rest of the twelve-month through, know no other flower. And when, in unfamiliar country, I have interrupted the ploughing to ask for guidance, I usually get it:—“Arbutus? Yaas. The’s a lot of it up along that hillside and in the woods over beyond—’t was out last week, some of it, I happened to notice”—this in the apologetic tone of one who admits a weakness—“guess you’ll find all you want.”I venture to say that of no other wild flower, except those which work specific harm or good, could I get such information.[pg 118]To many of us, city-bred, the tradition comes through inheritance. It means, perhaps, the shy, poetic side of our father’s boyhood, only half acknowledged, after the New England fashion, but none the less real and none the less our possession. It means rare days, when the city—whose chiefest signs of spring were the flare of dandelions in yards and parks and the chatter of English sparrows on ivy-clad church walls—was left behind, and we were“in the country.”It was a country excitingly different from the country of the summer vacation, a country not deeply green, but warmly brown, and sweet with the smell of moist, living earth. Green enough, indeed, in the spring-fed meadows and folds of the hills, where the early grass flashes into vividest emerald, but in the woods the soft mist-colored mazes of multitudinous twigs still show through their veilings and dustings of color—palest green of birches, gray-green of poplar, yellow-green of willows, and redder tones of the maples; and along the fence-lines and roadsides—blessed, untidy fence-lines and roadsides of New England—a fine penciling of red stems—the cut-back[pg 119]maple bushes and tangled vines alive to their tips and just bursting into leaf. And everywhere in the woods, on fence-lines and roadsides, the white blossoms of the“shad-blow,”daintiest of spring trees,—too slight for a tree, indeed, though too tall for a bush and looking less like a tree in blossom than like floating blossoms caught for a moment among the twigs. A moment only, for the first gust loosens them again and carpets the woods with their petals, but while they last their whiteness shimmers everywhere.Such rare days were all blown through with the wonderful wind of spring. Spring wind is really different from any other. It is not a finished thing, like the mellow winds of summer and the cold blasts of winter. It is an imperfect blend of shivering reminiscence and eager promise. One moment it breathes sun and stirring earth, the next it reminds us of old snow in the hollows, and bleak northern slopes.When, on these days, the wind blew to us, almost before we saw it, the first greeting of the arbutus, it always seemed that the day had found its complete and satisfying expression.[pg 120]Every one comes to realize, at some time in his life, the power of suggestion possessed by odors. Does not half the power of the Church lie in its incense? An odor, just because it is at once concrete and formless, can carry an appeal overwhelmingly strong and searching, superseding all other expression. This is the appeal made to me by the arbutus. It can never be quite precipitated into words, but it holds in solution all the things it has come to mean—dear human tradition and beloved companionship, the poetry of the land and the miracle of new birth.In late March or early April I am likely to see the first blossom on some friend’s table—I try not to see it first in a florist’s display! To my startled question she gives reassuring answer,“Oh, no, not from around here. This came from Virginia.”Days pass, and, perhaps, the mail brings some to me, this time from Pennsylvania or New Jersey, and soon I can no longer ignore the trays of tight, leafless bunches for sale on street corners and behind plate-glass windows.“From York State,”they tell me. I grow restive.[pg 121]“Jonathan,”I say, holding up a spray for him to smell,“we’ve got to go. You can’t resist that. We’ll take a day and go for it—and trout, too.”It is as well that arbutus comes in the trout season, for to take a day off just to pick a flower might seem a little absurd. But, coupled with trout—all is well. Trout is food. One must eat. The search for food needs no defense, and yet, the curious fact is, that if you go for trout and don’t get any, it doesn’t make so much difference as you might suppose, but if you go for arbutus and don’t get any, it makes all the difference in the world. And so Jonathan knows that in choosing his brook for that particular day, he must have regard primarily to the arbutus it will give us and only secondarily to the trout.Every one knows the kind of brook that is, for every one knows the kind of country arbutus loves—hilly country, with slopes toward the north; bits of woodland, preferably with pine in it, to give shade, but not too deep shade; a scrub undergrowth of laurel and huckleberry and bay; and always, somewhere[pg 122]within sight or hearing, water. It is curious how arbutus, which never grows in wet places, yet seems to like the neighborhood of water. It loves the slopes above a brook or the shaggy hillsides overlooking a little pond or river.Fortunately, there is such a brook, in just such country, on our list. There are not so many trout as in other brooks, but enough to justify our rods; and not so much arbutus as I could find elsewhere, but enough—oh, enough!To this brook we go. We tie Kit at the bridge, Jonathan slings on a fish-basket, to do for both, and I take a box or two for the flowers. But from this moment on our interests are somewhat at variance. The fact is, Jonathan cares a little more about the trout than about the arbutus, while I care a little more about the arbutus than about the trout. His eye is keenly on the brook, mine is, yearningly, on the ragged hillsides that roll up above it.Jonathan feels this.“There isn’t any for two fields yet—might as well stick to the brook.”[pg 123]“I know. I thought perhaps I’d go on down and let you fish this part. Then I’d meet you beyond the second fence—”“Oh, no, that won’t do at all. Why, there’s a rock just below here—down by that wild cherry—where I took out a beauty last year, and left another. I want you to go down and get him.”“You get him. I don’t mind.”“Oh, but I mind. Here, I’ve got it all planned: there’s a bit of brush-fishing just below—”“No brush-fishing for me, please!”“That’s what I’m saying, if you’ll only give me time. I’ll take that—there are always two or three in there—and when you’ve finished here you can go around me and fish the bend, under the hemlocks, and then the first arbutus is just beside that, and I’ll join you there.”“Well”—I assent grudgingly—“only, really, I’d be just as happy if you’d fish the whole thing and let me go right on down—”“No, you wouldn’t. Now, remember to sneak before you get to that rock. Drop in six feet above it and let the current do the[pg 124]rest. They’re awfully shy. I expect you to get at least one there, and two down at the bend.”He trudges off to his brush-fishing and leaves me bound in honor to extract a trout from under that rock. I deposit my boxes in the meadow above it, and“sneak”down. The sneak of a trout fisherman is like no other form of locomotion, and I am convinced that the human frame was not evolved with it in mind. But I resort to it in deference to Jonathan’s prejudices—in deference, also, to the fact that when I do not the trout seldom bite. And Jonathan is so trustfully counting on my getting that trout!I did get him. I dropped in my line, as per directions, and let the current do the rest; had the thrill of feeling the line suddenly caught and drawn under the rock, held, then wiggled slightly; I struck, felt the weight, drew back steadily, and in a few moments there was a flopping in the grass behind me.So that was off my mind.I strung him on a twig of wild cherry, gathered up my boxes, and wandered along the faint path, back of the patch of brush where, I knew, Jonathan was cheerfully[pg 125]threading his line through tangles of twig, briar, and vine, compared with which the needle’s eye is as a yawning barn door. Jonathan’s attitude toward brush-fishing is something which I respect without understanding. Down one long field I went, where the brook ran in shallow gayety, and there, ahead, was the bend, a sudden curve of water, deepening under the roots of an overhanging hemlock. I climbed the stone wall beside, glanced at the water—very trouty water indeed—glanced at the hill-pasture above—very arbutusy indeed—laid down my rod and my trout and my box, and ran up the low bank to a clump of bay and berry-bushes that I thought I remembered.… Yes! There it was! I had remembered! Ah! The dear things!When you first find arbutus, there is only one thing to do:—lie right down beside it. Its fragrance as it grows is different from what it is after it is picked, because with the sweetness of the blossoms is mingled the good smell of the earth and of the woody twigs and of the dried grass and leaves. And there are other rewards one gets by lying down. It is[pg 126]all very well to talk proudly about man’s walking with his head erect and his face to the heavens, but if we keep that posture all the time we miss a good deal. The attitude of the toad and the lizard is not to be scorned, though when the needs of locomotion convert it into the fisherman’s“sneak,”it is, as I have suggested, to be sparingly indulged in. But if we could only nibble now and then from“the other side”of Alice’s mushroom, what a new outlook we should get on the world that now lies about our feet! What new aspects of its beauty would be revealed to us: the forest grandeurs of the grass, the architecture of its slim shafts with their pillared aisles and pointed arches of interlocking and upspringing curves, their ceiling traceries of spraying tops against a far-away background of sky!To know arbutus, you must stoop to its level, and look across the fine, frosty fur of its stiff little leaves, and feel the nestle of its stems to the ground, the little up-fling of their tips toward the sun, and the neat radiance of its flower clusters, with their blessed fragrance and their pure, babyish color.[pg 127]But after that? You want to pick it. Yes, you really want to pick it!In this it is different from other flowers. Most of them I am well content to leave where they grow. In fact, the love of picking things—flowers or anything else—is a youthful taste: we lose it as we grow older; we become more and more willing to appreciate without acquiring, or rather, appreciation becomes to us a finer and more spiritual form of acquiring. Is it possible that, after all, the old idea of heaven as a state of enraptured contemplation is in harmony with the trend of our development?But if there is arbutus in heaven, I shall need to develop a good deal further not to want to pick it. It suggests picking; it almost invites it. There is something about the way it nestles and hides, that makes you want to see it better. Here is a spray of pure white, living under a green tent of overlapping leaves; one must raise it, and nip off just one leaf, so that the blossoms can see out. There is another, a pink cluster, showing faintly through the dry, matted grass. You feel for the stem, pull it gently, and, lo, it is many[pg 128]stems, which have crept their way under the tangle, and every one is tipped with a cluster of stars or round little buds each on its long stem, fairly begging to be picked. It gets picked.Yet sometimes its very beauty has stayed my hand. I shall never forget one clump I found, growing out of a bank of deep green moss, partly shaded by a great hemlock. The soft pink blossoms—luxuriant leafy sprays of them—were lying out on the moss in a pagan carelessness of beauty, as though some god had willed it there for his pleasure. I sat beside it a long time, and in the end I left it without picking it.On this particular day, Jonathan being still lost in the brush patch, I had risen from my visit with the first-discovered blossoms and wandered on, from clump to clump, wherever the glimpse of a leaf attracted me, picking the choicest here and there and dropping them into my box. After I do not know how long, I was roused by Jonathan’s whistle. I was some distance up the hillside by this time, and he was beside the brook, at the bend.[pg 129]“What luck?”he called.“Good luck! I’ve found lots. Come up!”He took a few steps up toward me, so that conversation could drop from shouting to speaking levels.“How many did you get?”he asked.“How many?… Oh … why … Oh, I got one up there where you showed me—under the rock, you know.”“Good one?”“Eight inches. He’s down there by the bars.”“Good! And what about the bend?”“The bend? Oh, I didn’t fish there—look at these! Aren’t they beauties?”I came down the hill to hold my open box up to his face. But my casual word almost effaced the scent of the flowers.“Ah—yes—delicious—didn’t fish there? Why not? Did they see you?”“Who? The trout? I don’t know. But I saw this. And I just had to pick it.”“Well! You’re a great fisherman! And with that water right there beside you! Lord!”“With the arbutus right here beside me! Lord!”[pg 130]“But the arbutus would wait.”“But the trout would wait. They’re waiting for you now, don’t you hear them? Go and fish there!”“No. That’s your pool.”Jonathan has a way of bestowing a trout-pool on me as if it were a bouquet. To refuse its opportunities is almost like throwing his flowers back in his face.“Well—of course it’s a beautiful pool—”“Best on the brook,”murmured Jonathan.“But, truly, I’d enjoy it just as much to have you fish it.”“Nobody can fish it now for a while. I thought you’d be there, of course, and I came stamping along down, close by the bank. They wouldn’t bite now—not for half an hour, anyway.”“Well, then, that’s just right. We’ll go on up the hillside for half an hour, and then come back and fish it. Set your rod up against the bayberry here, and come along—look there! you’re almost stepping on some!”Jonathan, gradually adjusting himself to the turn of things, stood his rod up against the bush with the meticulous care of the true[pg 131]sportsman.“Where did you leave yours?”he asked, with a suspiciousness born of a deep knowledge of my character.“Oh, down by the bars.”“Standing up or lying down?”“Lying down, I think. It’s all right.”“It’s not all right if it’s lying down. Anything might trample on it.”“For instance, what?—birds or crickets?”“For instance, people or cows.”He strode down the hill, and I saw him stoop. As he returned I could read disapproval in his gait.“Will you never learn how to treat a rod! It was lying just beyond the bars. I must have landed within two feet of it when I jumped over.”“I’m sorry. I meant to go back. I know perfectly how to treat a rod. My trouble comes in knowing when to apply my knowledge.… Well, let’s go up there. Near those big hemlocks there’s some, I remember.”And we wandered on, separating a little to scan the ground more widely.Once having pried his mind away from the trout, Jonathan was as keen for arbutus as I could wish, and soon I heard an exclamation,[pg 132]and saw him kneel.“Oh, come over!”he called;“you really ought to see this growing!”“But there’s some I want, right here, that’s lovely—”“Never mind. Come and see this—oh, come!”Of course I come, and of course I am glad I came, and of course soon I am obliged to call Jonathan to see some I have found—“Jonathan, it is truly the loveliestyet!It’s the way it grows—with the moss and all—please come!”And of course he comes.We had been on the hillside a long half-hour, much nearer an hour, when Jonathan began to grow restive.“Don’t you think you have enough?”he suggested several times. Finally, he spoke plainly of the trout.“Oh, yes, of course,”I said,“you go down and I’ll follow just as soon as I’ve gone along that upper path.”Not at all. That was not what was wanted. So I turned and we went down the hill, back to the bend, whose seductions I had been so puzzlingly able to resist. I am sure Jonathan has never yet quite understood how I could[pg 133]leave that bit of water at my left hand and turn away to the right.“Now—sneak!”We sneaked, and I sank down just back of the edge of the bank. Jonathan crouched some feet behind, coaching me:—“Now—draw out a little more line—not too much—there—and have some slack in your hand. Now, up-stream fifteen feet—allow for the wind—wait till that gust passes—now! Good! First-rate! Now let her drift—there—what did I tell you? Give him line!Givehim line! Now, feel of him—careful! You’ll know when to strike … there!… Oh! too bad!”For as I struck, my line held fast.“Snagged, by gummy! Can’t you pull clear?”“Not without stirring up the whole pool. You’ll have to do the fishing, after all.”“Oh!toobad! That’s hard luck!”“Not a bit. I like to watch you do it.”And so indeed I did. Once having realized that I was temporarily laid by, Jonathan put his whole mind on the pool, while I, being honorably released from all responsibility,[pg 134]except that of keeping my line taut, could put my whole mind on his performance. There is a little the same sort of pleasure in watching the skillful handling of a rod that there is in watching the bow-action of a violinist. Both things demand the utmost nicety of adjustment: body, arm, wrist, fingers uniting in an interplay of efficiency exactly adapted to the intricately shifting needs of each moment.Thus I watched, through the typical stages of the sport: the delicate flip of the bait into the current at just the right spot; its swift descent, imperceptibly guided by the rod’s quivering tip; its slower drift toward deep water; its sudden vanishing, and the whir of the reel as the line goes out; then the pause, the critical moments of“feeling for him”; at last the strike … and then, a flopping in the grass behind me, and Jonathan crawling back to kill and unhook him.“Don’t get up. There’s probably another one,”he said; and soon, by the same reptilian methods, was back for another try. There was another one, and yet another, and then a little fellow, barely hooked.“That’s all,”[pg 135]said Jonathan, as he rose to put him back into the pool, and we watched the pretty spotted creature fling himself upstream with a wild flourish of his gleaming body.“Now I’ll get you clear,”said Jonathan, wading out into the water, and, with sleeves rolled high, feeling deep, deep down under the opposite bank.“He had you all right—it’s wound round a root and then jabbed deep into it … hard luck! I wanted you to get those fellows!”And to this day I am sure he remembers those trout with a tinge of regret.I had intended leaving him to fish the rest of the brook, while I went back to that upper path to look up two or three special arbutus clumps that I knew, but seeing his depression over the snag incident, I could not suggest this. Instead I followed the stream with him, accepting his urgent offer of all the best pools, while he, taking what was left, drew out perfectly good trout from the most unhopeful-looking bits of water. And at the end, there was time to return along the upper path and visit my old friends, so both of us were satisfied.[pg 136]On such days, however, there is always one person who is not satisfied, and that is, Kit the horse. Kit has borne with our vagaries for many years, but she has never come to understand them. She never fails to greet our return, as our voices come within the range of her pricked-up ears, by a prolonged and reproachful whinny, which says as plainly as is necessary,“Back? Well—I shouldthinkit was time!I should think it was TIME!”Now and then we have thought it would be pleasant to have a little motor-car that could be tucked away at any roadside, without reference to a good hitching-place, but if we had it, I am sure we should miss that ungracious welcoming whinny. We should miss, too, the exasperated violence of Kit’s pace on the first bit of the home road—a violence expressing in the most ostentatious manner her opinion of folks who keep a respectable horse hitched by the roadside, far from the delights of the dim, sweet stable and the dusty, sneezy, munchy hay.But leaving out this little matter of Kit’s preference, and also the other little matter of the trout’s preference, I feel sure that an arbutus-trouting[pg 137]is peculiarly satisfying. It meets every human need—the need of food and beauty, the need of feeling strong and skillful, the need of becoming deeply aware of nature as living and kind. Moreover, it is very satisfying afterwards. As we sat that evening, over a late supper, with a shallow dish of arbutus beside us, I remarked,“The advantage of getting arbutus is, that you bring the whole day home with you and have it at your elbow.”“The advantage of getting trout,”remarked Jonathan dreamily, as if to himself,“is, that you bring your whole day home with you, and have it for breakfast.”

Every year, toward the end of March, I find Jonathan poking about in my sewing-box. And, unless I am very absent-minded, I know what he is after.

“No use looking there,”I remark;“I keep my silks put away.”

“I want red, and as strong as there is.”

“I know what you want. Here.”and I hand him a spool of red buttonhole twist.

“Ah! Just right!”And for the rest of the evening his fingers are busy.

Over what? Mending our trout-rods, of course. It is pretty work, calling for strength and precision of grasp, and as he winds and winds, adjusting all the little brass leading-rings, or supplying new ones, and staying points in the bamboo where he suspects weakness, we talk over last year’s trout-pools, and wonder what they will be like this year.

But beyond wonder we do not get, often for weeks after the trout season is, legislatively,[pg 116]“open.”Jonathan is“busy.”I am“busy.”We know that, if April passes, there is still May and June, and so, if at the end of April, or early May, we do at last pick up our rods,—all new-bedight with red silk windings, and shiny with fresh varnish,—it is not alone the call of the trout that decides us, but another call which is to me at least more imperious, because, if we neglect it now, there is no May and June in which to heed it. It is the call of the arbutus.

Any one with New England traditions knows what this call is. Its appeal is to something far deeper than the love of a pretty flower. For it is the flower that, to our fathers and our grandfathers, and to their fathers and grandfathers, meant spring; and not spring in its prettiness and ease, appealing to the idler in us, nor spring in its melancholy, appealing to—shall I say the poet in us? But spring in its blessedness of opportunity, its joyously triumphant life, appealing to the worker in us. Here, of course, we touch hands with all the races of the world for whom winter has been the supreme menace, spring the supreme and saving miracle. But each race has its own[pg 117]symbols, and to the New Englander the symbol is the arbutus.

This may seem a bit of sentimentality. And, indeed, we need not expect to find it expressed by any New England farmer. New England does not go out in gay companies to bring back the first blossoms. But New England does nothing in gay companies. It has been taught to distrust ceremonies and expression of any sort. It rejoices with reticence, it appreciates with a reservation. And yet I have seen a sprig of arbutus in rough and clumsy buttonholes on weather-faded lapels which, the rest of the twelve-month through, know no other flower. And when, in unfamiliar country, I have interrupted the ploughing to ask for guidance, I usually get it:—“Arbutus? Yaas. The’s a lot of it up along that hillside and in the woods over beyond—’t was out last week, some of it, I happened to notice”—this in the apologetic tone of one who admits a weakness—“guess you’ll find all you want.”I venture to say that of no other wild flower, except those which work specific harm or good, could I get such information.

To many of us, city-bred, the tradition comes through inheritance. It means, perhaps, the shy, poetic side of our father’s boyhood, only half acknowledged, after the New England fashion, but none the less real and none the less our possession. It means rare days, when the city—whose chiefest signs of spring were the flare of dandelions in yards and parks and the chatter of English sparrows on ivy-clad church walls—was left behind, and we were“in the country.”It was a country excitingly different from the country of the summer vacation, a country not deeply green, but warmly brown, and sweet with the smell of moist, living earth. Green enough, indeed, in the spring-fed meadows and folds of the hills, where the early grass flashes into vividest emerald, but in the woods the soft mist-colored mazes of multitudinous twigs still show through their veilings and dustings of color—palest green of birches, gray-green of poplar, yellow-green of willows, and redder tones of the maples; and along the fence-lines and roadsides—blessed, untidy fence-lines and roadsides of New England—a fine penciling of red stems—the cut-back[pg 119]maple bushes and tangled vines alive to their tips and just bursting into leaf. And everywhere in the woods, on fence-lines and roadsides, the white blossoms of the“shad-blow,”daintiest of spring trees,—too slight for a tree, indeed, though too tall for a bush and looking less like a tree in blossom than like floating blossoms caught for a moment among the twigs. A moment only, for the first gust loosens them again and carpets the woods with their petals, but while they last their whiteness shimmers everywhere.

Such rare days were all blown through with the wonderful wind of spring. Spring wind is really different from any other. It is not a finished thing, like the mellow winds of summer and the cold blasts of winter. It is an imperfect blend of shivering reminiscence and eager promise. One moment it breathes sun and stirring earth, the next it reminds us of old snow in the hollows, and bleak northern slopes.

When, on these days, the wind blew to us, almost before we saw it, the first greeting of the arbutus, it always seemed that the day had found its complete and satisfying expression.[pg 120]Every one comes to realize, at some time in his life, the power of suggestion possessed by odors. Does not half the power of the Church lie in its incense? An odor, just because it is at once concrete and formless, can carry an appeal overwhelmingly strong and searching, superseding all other expression. This is the appeal made to me by the arbutus. It can never be quite precipitated into words, but it holds in solution all the things it has come to mean—dear human tradition and beloved companionship, the poetry of the land and the miracle of new birth.

In late March or early April I am likely to see the first blossom on some friend’s table—I try not to see it first in a florist’s display! To my startled question she gives reassuring answer,“Oh, no, not from around here. This came from Virginia.”

Days pass, and, perhaps, the mail brings some to me, this time from Pennsylvania or New Jersey, and soon I can no longer ignore the trays of tight, leafless bunches for sale on street corners and behind plate-glass windows.“From York State,”they tell me. I grow restive.

“Jonathan,”I say, holding up a spray for him to smell,“we’ve got to go. You can’t resist that. We’ll take a day and go for it—and trout, too.”

It is as well that arbutus comes in the trout season, for to take a day off just to pick a flower might seem a little absurd. But, coupled with trout—all is well. Trout is food. One must eat. The search for food needs no defense, and yet, the curious fact is, that if you go for trout and don’t get any, it doesn’t make so much difference as you might suppose, but if you go for arbutus and don’t get any, it makes all the difference in the world. And so Jonathan knows that in choosing his brook for that particular day, he must have regard primarily to the arbutus it will give us and only secondarily to the trout.

Every one knows the kind of brook that is, for every one knows the kind of country arbutus loves—hilly country, with slopes toward the north; bits of woodland, preferably with pine in it, to give shade, but not too deep shade; a scrub undergrowth of laurel and huckleberry and bay; and always, somewhere[pg 122]within sight or hearing, water. It is curious how arbutus, which never grows in wet places, yet seems to like the neighborhood of water. It loves the slopes above a brook or the shaggy hillsides overlooking a little pond or river.

Fortunately, there is such a brook, in just such country, on our list. There are not so many trout as in other brooks, but enough to justify our rods; and not so much arbutus as I could find elsewhere, but enough—oh, enough!

To this brook we go. We tie Kit at the bridge, Jonathan slings on a fish-basket, to do for both, and I take a box or two for the flowers. But from this moment on our interests are somewhat at variance. The fact is, Jonathan cares a little more about the trout than about the arbutus, while I care a little more about the arbutus than about the trout. His eye is keenly on the brook, mine is, yearningly, on the ragged hillsides that roll up above it.

Jonathan feels this.“There isn’t any for two fields yet—might as well stick to the brook.”

“I know. I thought perhaps I’d go on down and let you fish this part. Then I’d meet you beyond the second fence—”

“Oh, no, that won’t do at all. Why, there’s a rock just below here—down by that wild cherry—where I took out a beauty last year, and left another. I want you to go down and get him.”

“You get him. I don’t mind.”

“Oh, but I mind. Here, I’ve got it all planned: there’s a bit of brush-fishing just below—”

“No brush-fishing for me, please!”

“That’s what I’m saying, if you’ll only give me time. I’ll take that—there are always two or three in there—and when you’ve finished here you can go around me and fish the bend, under the hemlocks, and then the first arbutus is just beside that, and I’ll join you there.”

“Well”—I assent grudgingly—“only, really, I’d be just as happy if you’d fish the whole thing and let me go right on down—”

“No, you wouldn’t. Now, remember to sneak before you get to that rock. Drop in six feet above it and let the current do the[pg 124]rest. They’re awfully shy. I expect you to get at least one there, and two down at the bend.”He trudges off to his brush-fishing and leaves me bound in honor to extract a trout from under that rock. I deposit my boxes in the meadow above it, and“sneak”down. The sneak of a trout fisherman is like no other form of locomotion, and I am convinced that the human frame was not evolved with it in mind. But I resort to it in deference to Jonathan’s prejudices—in deference, also, to the fact that when I do not the trout seldom bite. And Jonathan is so trustfully counting on my getting that trout!

I did get him. I dropped in my line, as per directions, and let the current do the rest; had the thrill of feeling the line suddenly caught and drawn under the rock, held, then wiggled slightly; I struck, felt the weight, drew back steadily, and in a few moments there was a flopping in the grass behind me.

So that was off my mind.

I strung him on a twig of wild cherry, gathered up my boxes, and wandered along the faint path, back of the patch of brush where, I knew, Jonathan was cheerfully[pg 125]threading his line through tangles of twig, briar, and vine, compared with which the needle’s eye is as a yawning barn door. Jonathan’s attitude toward brush-fishing is something which I respect without understanding. Down one long field I went, where the brook ran in shallow gayety, and there, ahead, was the bend, a sudden curve of water, deepening under the roots of an overhanging hemlock. I climbed the stone wall beside, glanced at the water—very trouty water indeed—glanced at the hill-pasture above—very arbutusy indeed—laid down my rod and my trout and my box, and ran up the low bank to a clump of bay and berry-bushes that I thought I remembered.… Yes! There it was! I had remembered! Ah! The dear things!

When you first find arbutus, there is only one thing to do:—lie right down beside it. Its fragrance as it grows is different from what it is after it is picked, because with the sweetness of the blossoms is mingled the good smell of the earth and of the woody twigs and of the dried grass and leaves. And there are other rewards one gets by lying down. It is[pg 126]all very well to talk proudly about man’s walking with his head erect and his face to the heavens, but if we keep that posture all the time we miss a good deal. The attitude of the toad and the lizard is not to be scorned, though when the needs of locomotion convert it into the fisherman’s“sneak,”it is, as I have suggested, to be sparingly indulged in. But if we could only nibble now and then from“the other side”of Alice’s mushroom, what a new outlook we should get on the world that now lies about our feet! What new aspects of its beauty would be revealed to us: the forest grandeurs of the grass, the architecture of its slim shafts with their pillared aisles and pointed arches of interlocking and upspringing curves, their ceiling traceries of spraying tops against a far-away background of sky!

To know arbutus, you must stoop to its level, and look across the fine, frosty fur of its stiff little leaves, and feel the nestle of its stems to the ground, the little up-fling of their tips toward the sun, and the neat radiance of its flower clusters, with their blessed fragrance and their pure, babyish color.

But after that? You want to pick it. Yes, you really want to pick it!

In this it is different from other flowers. Most of them I am well content to leave where they grow. In fact, the love of picking things—flowers or anything else—is a youthful taste: we lose it as we grow older; we become more and more willing to appreciate without acquiring, or rather, appreciation becomes to us a finer and more spiritual form of acquiring. Is it possible that, after all, the old idea of heaven as a state of enraptured contemplation is in harmony with the trend of our development?

But if there is arbutus in heaven, I shall need to develop a good deal further not to want to pick it. It suggests picking; it almost invites it. There is something about the way it nestles and hides, that makes you want to see it better. Here is a spray of pure white, living under a green tent of overlapping leaves; one must raise it, and nip off just one leaf, so that the blossoms can see out. There is another, a pink cluster, showing faintly through the dry, matted grass. You feel for the stem, pull it gently, and, lo, it is many[pg 128]stems, which have crept their way under the tangle, and every one is tipped with a cluster of stars or round little buds each on its long stem, fairly begging to be picked. It gets picked.

Yet sometimes its very beauty has stayed my hand. I shall never forget one clump I found, growing out of a bank of deep green moss, partly shaded by a great hemlock. The soft pink blossoms—luxuriant leafy sprays of them—were lying out on the moss in a pagan carelessness of beauty, as though some god had willed it there for his pleasure. I sat beside it a long time, and in the end I left it without picking it.

On this particular day, Jonathan being still lost in the brush patch, I had risen from my visit with the first-discovered blossoms and wandered on, from clump to clump, wherever the glimpse of a leaf attracted me, picking the choicest here and there and dropping them into my box. After I do not know how long, I was roused by Jonathan’s whistle. I was some distance up the hillside by this time, and he was beside the brook, at the bend.

“What luck?”he called.

“Good luck! I’ve found lots. Come up!”

He took a few steps up toward me, so that conversation could drop from shouting to speaking levels.“How many did you get?”he asked.

“How many?… Oh … why … Oh, I got one up there where you showed me—under the rock, you know.”

“Good one?”

“Eight inches. He’s down there by the bars.”

“Good! And what about the bend?”

“The bend? Oh, I didn’t fish there—look at these! Aren’t they beauties?”I came down the hill to hold my open box up to his face. But my casual word almost effaced the scent of the flowers.

“Ah—yes—delicious—didn’t fish there? Why not? Did they see you?”

“Who? The trout? I don’t know. But I saw this. And I just had to pick it.”

“Well! You’re a great fisherman! And with that water right there beside you! Lord!”

“With the arbutus right here beside me! Lord!”

“But the arbutus would wait.”

“But the trout would wait. They’re waiting for you now, don’t you hear them? Go and fish there!”

“No. That’s your pool.”Jonathan has a way of bestowing a trout-pool on me as if it were a bouquet. To refuse its opportunities is almost like throwing his flowers back in his face.

“Well—of course it’s a beautiful pool—”

“Best on the brook,”murmured Jonathan.

“But, truly, I’d enjoy it just as much to have you fish it.”

“Nobody can fish it now for a while. I thought you’d be there, of course, and I came stamping along down, close by the bank. They wouldn’t bite now—not for half an hour, anyway.”

“Well, then, that’s just right. We’ll go on up the hillside for half an hour, and then come back and fish it. Set your rod up against the bayberry here, and come along—look there! you’re almost stepping on some!”

Jonathan, gradually adjusting himself to the turn of things, stood his rod up against the bush with the meticulous care of the true[pg 131]sportsman.“Where did you leave yours?”he asked, with a suspiciousness born of a deep knowledge of my character.

“Oh, down by the bars.”

“Standing up or lying down?”

“Lying down, I think. It’s all right.”

“It’s not all right if it’s lying down. Anything might trample on it.”

“For instance, what?—birds or crickets?”

“For instance, people or cows.”He strode down the hill, and I saw him stoop. As he returned I could read disapproval in his gait.“Will you never learn how to treat a rod! It was lying just beyond the bars. I must have landed within two feet of it when I jumped over.”

“I’m sorry. I meant to go back. I know perfectly how to treat a rod. My trouble comes in knowing when to apply my knowledge.… Well, let’s go up there. Near those big hemlocks there’s some, I remember.”And we wandered on, separating a little to scan the ground more widely.

Once having pried his mind away from the trout, Jonathan was as keen for arbutus as I could wish, and soon I heard an exclamation,[pg 132]and saw him kneel.“Oh, come over!”he called;“you really ought to see this growing!”

“But there’s some I want, right here, that’s lovely—”

“Never mind. Come and see this—oh, come!”

Of course I come, and of course I am glad I came, and of course soon I am obliged to call Jonathan to see some I have found—“Jonathan, it is truly the loveliestyet!It’s the way it grows—with the moss and all—please come!”And of course he comes.

We had been on the hillside a long half-hour, much nearer an hour, when Jonathan began to grow restive.“Don’t you think you have enough?”he suggested several times. Finally, he spoke plainly of the trout.

“Oh, yes, of course,”I said,“you go down and I’ll follow just as soon as I’ve gone along that upper path.”

Not at all. That was not what was wanted. So I turned and we went down the hill, back to the bend, whose seductions I had been so puzzlingly able to resist. I am sure Jonathan has never yet quite understood how I could[pg 133]leave that bit of water at my left hand and turn away to the right.

“Now—sneak!”

We sneaked, and I sank down just back of the edge of the bank. Jonathan crouched some feet behind, coaching me:—“Now—draw out a little more line—not too much—there—and have some slack in your hand. Now, up-stream fifteen feet—allow for the wind—wait till that gust passes—now! Good! First-rate! Now let her drift—there—what did I tell you? Give him line!Givehim line! Now, feel of him—careful! You’ll know when to strike … there!… Oh! too bad!”

For as I struck, my line held fast.

“Snagged, by gummy! Can’t you pull clear?”

“Not without stirring up the whole pool. You’ll have to do the fishing, after all.”

“Oh!toobad! That’s hard luck!”

“Not a bit. I like to watch you do it.”

And so indeed I did. Once having realized that I was temporarily laid by, Jonathan put his whole mind on the pool, while I, being honorably released from all responsibility,[pg 134]except that of keeping my line taut, could put my whole mind on his performance. There is a little the same sort of pleasure in watching the skillful handling of a rod that there is in watching the bow-action of a violinist. Both things demand the utmost nicety of adjustment: body, arm, wrist, fingers uniting in an interplay of efficiency exactly adapted to the intricately shifting needs of each moment.

Thus I watched, through the typical stages of the sport: the delicate flip of the bait into the current at just the right spot; its swift descent, imperceptibly guided by the rod’s quivering tip; its slower drift toward deep water; its sudden vanishing, and the whir of the reel as the line goes out; then the pause, the critical moments of“feeling for him”; at last the strike … and then, a flopping in the grass behind me, and Jonathan crawling back to kill and unhook him.

“Don’t get up. There’s probably another one,”he said; and soon, by the same reptilian methods, was back for another try. There was another one, and yet another, and then a little fellow, barely hooked.“That’s all,”[pg 135]said Jonathan, as he rose to put him back into the pool, and we watched the pretty spotted creature fling himself upstream with a wild flourish of his gleaming body.

“Now I’ll get you clear,”said Jonathan, wading out into the water, and, with sleeves rolled high, feeling deep, deep down under the opposite bank.“He had you all right—it’s wound round a root and then jabbed deep into it … hard luck! I wanted you to get those fellows!”And to this day I am sure he remembers those trout with a tinge of regret.

I had intended leaving him to fish the rest of the brook, while I went back to that upper path to look up two or three special arbutus clumps that I knew, but seeing his depression over the snag incident, I could not suggest this. Instead I followed the stream with him, accepting his urgent offer of all the best pools, while he, taking what was left, drew out perfectly good trout from the most unhopeful-looking bits of water. And at the end, there was time to return along the upper path and visit my old friends, so both of us were satisfied.

On such days, however, there is always one person who is not satisfied, and that is, Kit the horse. Kit has borne with our vagaries for many years, but she has never come to understand them. She never fails to greet our return, as our voices come within the range of her pricked-up ears, by a prolonged and reproachful whinny, which says as plainly as is necessary,“Back? Well—I shouldthinkit was time!I should think it was TIME!”Now and then we have thought it would be pleasant to have a little motor-car that could be tucked away at any roadside, without reference to a good hitching-place, but if we had it, I am sure we should miss that ungracious welcoming whinny. We should miss, too, the exasperated violence of Kit’s pace on the first bit of the home road—a violence expressing in the most ostentatious manner her opinion of folks who keep a respectable horse hitched by the roadside, far from the delights of the dim, sweet stable and the dusty, sneezy, munchy hay.

But leaving out this little matter of Kit’s preference, and also the other little matter of the trout’s preference, I feel sure that an arbutus-trouting[pg 137]is peculiarly satisfying. It meets every human need—the need of food and beauty, the need of feeling strong and skillful, the need of becoming deeply aware of nature as living and kind. Moreover, it is very satisfying afterwards. As we sat that evening, over a late supper, with a shallow dish of arbutus beside us, I remarked,“The advantage of getting arbutus is, that you bring the whole day home with you and have it at your elbow.”

“The advantage of getting trout,”remarked Jonathan dreamily, as if to himself,“is, that you bring your whole day home with you, and have it for breakfast.”

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