The Idyl of Twin Fires

What I actually did was to curse to myself at having to clean my teeth in bitterly cold water, something I have always loathed. Nor was I greatly cheered by Mrs. Temple’s coffee. The New England farmer’s wife can cook everything but coffee. But there seems to be something in that simple art which completely baffles her. Perhaps the coffee has something to do with it!

Her cheery face, however, was not long to be resisted, and Bert hustled me off immediately after the meal to meet Hard Cider Howard, whom, by some rural wireless, he had already summoned.

As we walked down the road, I glanced toward my lone pine, and saw my horse and Mike’s hitched to the plough, with Joe driving and Mike holding the handles. Across the green pasture, between the road and the hayfield, already four rich brown furrows were shining up to the sun.

“Well, Mike didn’t wait long!” I exclaimed. “I wonder why he started in there?”

“I told him to,” said Bert. “That’s goin’ ter be yer pertater crop this year.”

“Is it?” said I. “Why?” I felt a little peeved. After all, this was my farm.

“Cuz it’s pasture land thet’s good fer pertaters, an’ yer don’t need it fer the cows, an’ it kin be worked ter give yer a crop right off, even though ’twant ploughed under in the fall,” Bert answered. “You trust yer Uncle Hiram fer a bit, sonny.”

I blushed at my own peevishness, and thanked him humbly. At the house we found awaiting a strange-looking man, small, wrinkled, unkempt, with a discouraged moustache and a nose of a decidedly brighter hue than the rest of his countenance. He was tapping at the sills of the house.

“How about it, Hard? Cement?” said Bert.

Hard Cider nodded to me, with a keen glance from his little, bloodshot eyes.

“Yep,” he said. “Stucco over it. Brick underpinnin’s be ez good ez noo. Go inside.”

We stepped upon the side porch, Bert handing me the key and I opening the door of my new dwelling with a secret thrill. Hard Cider at once began on the kitchen floor, ripping up a plank to examine the timbers beneath. There was no cellar under the kitchen, but the timbers were, like those of the barn, huge beams of hand-hewn oak, and were sound.

“Plane them planks down and lay a maple floor over ’em,” said Hard, with an air of finality.

“Very well,” said I meekly. “But my woodwork has got to be cypress in the living-room. I insist on cypress.”

“New step,” he added, as we came to the door up into the main house.

“Hold on!” said I. “This door leads into the front hall. I don’t want that. I want this door closed up and put into the north room, which I’m going to use for a dining-room.”

“Ain’t goin’ ter eat in the kitchen, eh? Very well,” said Hard. He examined the old door frame carefully, and jotted something in a dirty notebook, which he drew from his pocket, first wetting his flat carpenter’s pencil on his tongue.

We found that the north room had apparently been used only as a kind of storage closet, doubtless because there was no heater in the house. It had never been papered, and the walls, with a little touching up, were ready for kalsomining. Hard examined the plaster with the loving eye of a connoisseur.

“Built ter last in them days,” I heard him mutter.

The room extended half the depth of the house, which, to be sure, was not great. Beyond it was a second room, on the northeast corner, of the same size.

We now crossed the hall to the south side, where there were two corresponding rooms. Here, as on the other side, the chimney and fireplaces were on the inside walls, and the mantels were of a simple but very good colonial pattern, though they had been browned by smoke and time to dirt colour.

“Now I want these two rooms made into one,” said I. “I want one of the doors into the hall closed up, and a glass door cut out of the south side to a pergola veranda. Can you do it?”

Hard examined the partition. He climbed on a box which we dragged in, and ripped away plaster and woodwork ruthlessly, both at the top and at places on the sides, all without speaking a word.

“Yep,” he said finally, “ef yer don’t mind a big crossbeam showin’. She’s solid oak. Yer door, though, ’ll have to be double, with a beam in the middle.”

“Fine!” I cried. “One to go in by, one to go out. Guests please keep to the right!”

“Hev ter alter yer chimney,” he added, “or yer’ll hev two fireplaces.”

“Fine again!” cried I. “A long room with two fireplaces, and a double-faced bookcase coming out at right angles between them, with two settles below it, one for each fireplace! Better than I’d dreamed!”

“Suit yerself,” said Hard.

We next arranged tentatively for a brick veranda with a pergola top on the southern end of the house, and then went upstairs. Here the four small chambers needed little but minor repairs and plaster work, save that over the dining-room, which was to be converted into the bathroom. The great space over the kitchen was to be cut into two servants’ bedrooms, with dormer windows. It already had the two windows, one to the north and one to the south, and had evidently been used as a drying-room for apples and the like. Hard figured here for some time, and then led us silently downstairs again, and through the front door.

My front doorway had once been a thing of beauty, with two little panel windows at the sides, and above all, on the outside, a heavy, hand-carved broken pediment, like the top of a Governor Winthrop highboy. Hard looked at it with admiration gleaming in his eyes. “I’d ruther restore this than all the rest o’ the job,” he said, and his ugly, rumsoaked little face positively shone with enthusiasm.

“Go ahead,” said I; “only I want the new steps of brick, widely spaced, with a lot of cement showing between. I’m going to terrace it here in front, too–a grass terrace for ten feet out.”

“Thet’s right, thet’s right!” he exclaimed. “Now I’ll go order the lumber, an’ bring yer the estimate termorrer.”

“Seems to me the usual proceeding would be the other way around!” I gasped.

“Well, yer want me ter do the job, don’t yer? Or don’t yer?” he said brusquely.

“Of course, of course!” I amended hastily. “Go ahead!”

Hard climbed into a broken-down wagon, and disappeared. “Don’t you worry,” said Bert. “I’ll see he treats yer right.”

“It isn’t that,” I said sadly. “It’s that I’ve just remembered I forgot to include any painters’ bills in my own estimate.”

Bert looked at me in a kind of speechless pity for a moment. Then he said slowly: “Wal, I’ll be swizzled! Wait till I tell maw! An’ her always stickin’ up fer a college education!”

“Just for that, I’ll show you!” cried I. “I never trimmed an apple tree in my life, but I’m going to work on this orchard, and I’m going to save it, all myself. It will be better than yours in three years.”

“Go to it,” laughed Bert. “Come back fer dinner, though. Neow I’ll drive over ter the depot an’ git yer freight. They telephoned this mornin’ it had come.”

“Good!” I cried. “You might bring me a bag of cement, too, and a gallon of carbolic acid.”

“Ye ain’t tired o’ life so soon, be yer?”

“No,” said I, “but I’m going to show you rubes how to treat an orchard.”

Bert went off laughing, and presently I saw him driving toward town with his heavy wagon. I walked up to the plateau field to greet Mike. As I crested the ridge the field lay before me, the great, lone pine standing sentinel at the farther side; and half of it was frail, young green, and half rich, shining brown.

“She ploughs tough, sor,” said Mike, as the panting horses paused for breath, “but she’ll harrer down good. Be the seed pertaters come yit?”

“Bert has gone for them,” said I. “Let me hold the plough once.”

Mike, I fancied, winked at his son Joe, who was a strong lad of twenty, with an amiable Irish grin. So everybody was regarding me as a joke! Well, I was, even then, as strong as Mike, and I’d held a sweep, if not a plough! I picked up the handles and lifted the plough around, setting the point to the new furrow. Joe started the horses. The blade wabbled, took a mad skid for the surface, and the handles hit me a blow in the ribs which knocked my breath out. Mike grinned. I set my teeth and the ploughshare, and again Joe started the horses. Putting forth all my strength I held the plough under the sod this time, but the furrow I ploughed started merrily away from the straight line, in spite of all my efforts, and began to run out into the unbroken ground to the left. I pulled the plough back again to the starting-point, and tried once more. This trip, when I reached the point where my first furrow had departed from the straight and narrow way, the cross strip of sod came over the point like a comber over a boat’s bow, and the horses stopped with a jerk, while the point went down and again the handles smote me in the ribs.

“It ain’t so azy as it looks,” said Mike.

“I’ll do it if I haven’t a rib left,” said I grimly.

And I did it. My first full furrow looked like the track of a snake under the influence of liquor, but I reversed the plough and came back fairly straight. I was beginning to get the hang of it. My next furrow was respectable, but not deep. But on the second return trip I ploughed her straight, and I ploughed her deep, and that without exerting nearly so much beef as on the first try. Most things are easy when you once know how.

On this return trip the sweat was starting from my forehead, and the smell of the horses and of the warm, fresh-turned earth was strong in my nostrils. I didn’t look at my pine, nor think of book plates. I was proud at what I had done, and my muscles gloried in the toil. Again I swung the plough around, and drove it across the field, feeling the reluctant grass roots fighting every muscle of my arms.

“There,” said I, triumphantly, “you plough all the rest as deep as that!”

“Begobs, ye’z all right!” cried Mike.

I went back again down the slope with all the joy of a small boy who has suddenly made an older boy recognize his importance. I went at once to the shed, found a rusty saw (for my pruning saws, of course, had not yet come), and descended upon the orchard. I had a couple of bulletins on pruning in my pocket, with pictures of old trees remorselessly headed down. I took a fresh look at the pictures, reread some of the text where I had marked it, and tackled the first tree, carefully repeating to myself: “Remove only a third the first year, remove only a third the first year.”

This, I decided, quite naturally did not refer to dead wood. By the time I had the dead wood cut out of that first old tree, and all the water spouts removed (as I recalled my grandfather used to call them), which didn’t seem necessary for new bearing wood, the poor thing began to look naked. On one side an old water spout or sucker had achieved the dignity of a limb and shot far into the air. I was up in the tree carefully heading this back and out when Bert came driving by with his wagon heaped to overflowing.

“Hi!” he called, “yer tryin’ ter kill them trees entire!”

I got down and came out to the road. “You’re a fine man and a true friend, Mr. Temple,” said I, “but I’m going to be the doctor for this orchard. A chap’s got to have some say for himself, you know.”

“Well, they ain’t much good, anyhow, them trees,” said Bert cheerfully.

We now fell to unloading the wagon. We opened up the woodsheds and storehouse behind the kitchen, stowed in the barrels of seed potatoes, the fertilizers, the various other seeds, the farm implements, sprayers, and so on. The hotbed frames and sashes were put away for future use, as it was too late to need them now. The horse hoe Bert had not been able to bring on this trip. Next we got my books and furniture into the house or shed, and tired, hot, and dirty, we drove on up the road for dinner. As we passed the upper field, I saw that the ploughing was nearly done. The brown furrows had already lost their gloss, as my hands had already lost their whiteness.

“Well, I’m a farmer now!” said I, surveying my soil-caked boots and grimy clothes.

“Yer on the way, anyhow,” said Bert. “But yer’ll have ter cultivate thet field hard, seein’s how it oughter hev been ploughed last fall.”

That afternoon I went back to my orchard, got out my shiny and sharp new double-edged pruning saw, and sawed till both arms ached. I sawed under limbs and over limbs, right-handed and left-handed, standing on my feet and on my head. I obeyed the first rule, to saw close to the trunk, so the bark can cover the scar. I obeyed the rule to let light into the tops. I didn’t head my trees down as much as the pictures indicated, for I wanted my orchard before the house as a decoration quite as much as a source of fruit supply. One old tree, split by a winter storm, I decided to chop down entirely. About half-past three, as I supposed it to be, I went for an axe, and heard Mike putting the horse into the barn and calling the cows. I looked at my watch. It was five o’clock! I didn’t get the axe, but walked back and surveyed the havoc I had wrought–dead limbs strewing the ground, bright-barked water spouts lying among them, tangles of top branches heaped high, and above this litter three old trees rising, apparently half denuded, with great white scars all over them where the limbs had been removed. I had gone that first day across half the top row of the orchard, and I suddenly realized that during the entire time I had been at work not a thought had crossed my mind except of apple trees and their culture. I had been utterly absorbed, joyfully absorbed, in the process of sawing off limbs! Where, said I to myself, are those poetic reflections, those delicious day dreams which come, in books, to the workers in gardens? Can it be that, in reality, the good gardener thinks of his job? Or am I simply a bad gardener?

I decided to go to the barn and ask Mike. I found him washing his hands, preparatory to milking, and looking extremely bored. He used an antiseptic solution which Bert had provided, for Bert was still buying my milk.

“Sure, it’s silly rules they be makin’ now about a little thing like milkin’,” he said.

I wasn’t ready to argue with him then, but I secretly resolved that I’d make him wear a milking coat, also. I asked abruptly: “Mike, what do you think about when you are working in the garden?”

Mike reflected quite seriously for a full moment, while the alternate ring of the milk streams sang a tune on the bottom of the pail.

“Begobs, Oi niver thought o’ that before,” he said. “Sure, it’s interestin’ to think what ye think about. Oi guess Oi thinks mostly o’ me gardenin’. It ain’t till Oi straightens the kink out o’ me back and gits me lunch pail in the shade that Oi begins to wonder if the Dimicrats ’ll carry the country or why we can’t go sivin days without a drink, like the camels.”

“You sort of have to keep your mind on your job, to do it right, eh?”

“Sure, if ye’ve got one to keep,” Mike laughed.

The milk streams had ceased to ring. They were sizzling now, for the bottom of the pail was covered. There was a warm smell of milk in the stable, and of hay and cattle. Through the little door at the end I saw framed a pretty landscape of my pasture, then woods rising up a hill, and then the blue mountains, purpling now with sunset. My arms ached. My ribs, where the plough handles had hit, were sore. I was sleepily, deliciously, tired. I had done a real day’s work. I was rather proud of it, too, proud that I could stand so much physical toil. After all, it is human to glory in your muscles.

“Good night,” I called to Mike, as I started for home.

“Good night, sor,” he sang cheerily back.

Upon the plateau I saw my rusty old disk harrow–a legacy from Milt–standing on the brown earth. The furrows had disappeared. The field was almost ready for planting. I took a bath, rubbing my ribs and aching shoulders very tenderly, ate my supper hungrily, and settled down to my manuscripts. In ten minutes I was nodding.

“Good heavens!” said I, “this will never do! I’ll have to get up in the morning and work.”

So I bade Mrs. Temple wake me when she got up at five.

“Well,” I reflected, as I tumbled into bed, “you can’t have everything and a country estate, too. Fancy me getting up at five o’clock!”

Chapter IV
I PUMP UP A GHOST

What is there about remodelling an old house, renovating an old orchard, planting a fresh-ploughed field, even building a chicken coop, which inspires us to such enthusiasm? I have written a few things of which I am not ashamed, and taken great joy in their creation. But it was not the same joy as that I take in making even one new garden bed, and not in the least comparable to the joy of those first glorious days when my old house was shaping up anew. It has often seemed to me almost biological, this delight in domestic planning both inside and outside of the dwelling–as though it were foreordained that man should have each his own plot of earth, which calls out a primal and instinctive æstheticism like nothing else, and is coupled with the domestic instinct to reinforce it. I have known men deaf and blind to every other form of beauty who clung with a loyal and redeeming love to the flowers in their dooryard.

As I came into my own dooryard, I found Hard Cider unloading lumber. He nodded briefly, and handed me a dirty slip of paper–his estimate. Evidently he, too, had paternally taken me over, for this estimate included the plumber’s bill for a heater, the water connections for house and barn, a boiler on the kitchen range, and the bathroom. The bill would come to $3,000. That far exceeded my own estimate, and I had still the painters to reckon with! However, Hard’s bill seemed fair enough, for Bert had told me the price of lumber, and there was a lot of digging to connect with the town main. I nodded “Go ahead,” and opened the door. In three minutes he and his assistant were busily at work.

In the woodshed I found Mike cutting up the seed potatoes into baskets.

“Good mornin’,” he said. “Joe’s got the tooth harrer workin’, and we’ll be plantin’ this afternoon.”

I started then toward the orchard, only to meet the boss plumber arriving. With him I went down cellar to decide on the position for the heater. “Of course you’re going to have hot water?” said the boss.

“Am I?” said I. “I loathe radiators. They spoil the rooms. Wouldn’t you, as a great concession, let me have old-fashioned hot air?”

“You can have anything you want, of course,” the plumber replied, being, like most of his kind, without a sense of humour, “but to get register pipes upstairs in this old house you’ll spoil your rooms more than with radiators. We have some very ornamental radiators.”

“There ain’t no such animal,” said I.

But I ended with hot water. There were to be four radiators downstairs and three upstairs, one in the bathroom, one in the hall, and one in a chamber. The other chambers, having fireplaces, I decided needed no further heat, though the plumber was mournfully skeptical. That made seven in all, and did not call for a large heater. After much dickering and argument, the plumber consented to leave the old copper pump at the sink, in addition to the faucets. I refused to let that pump go, with its polished brass knob on the iron handle, even though the sink was to be replaced by a porcelain one. As the bathroom was almost over the kitchen, and as the house already had a good cesspool, by some happy miracle, the work was comparatively simple, and the plumber left to get his men and supplies.

Again I started for the orchard. Already the buds were swelling on the old trees, and the haze of nascent foliage hung over them. I had four and a half rows to trim, and then the whole orchard to go over with paint pot and gouge and cement. I had never trimmed a tree in my life till the day before, yet I felt that I was doing a better job than Bert had done on his trees, for Bert’s idea of pruning was to cut off all the limbs he could reach near the trunk, often leaving a stub four inches long when it didn’t happen to be convenient to saw closer. He made his living, and a good one, selling milk and cauliflowers–he had thirty acres down to cauliflowers, and shipped them to New York–but, like so many New England farmers, he couldn’t or wouldn’t understand the simple science of tree culture. Anybody can learn tree culture with a little application to the right books or models and a little imagination to see into the future. A good tree pruner has to be a bit of an architect. I thought so then in my pride, at any rate, and it turned out I was right. Right or wrong, however, I went at my job that morning with a mighty zest, and soon had a second barrier of dead wood heaped upon the ground.

As I worked, I thought how this orchard must be trimmed and cleaned up first, but how the fine planting weather was upon us, too, and I ought to be getting my garden seeds in, if I was to have any flowers. I thought, also, of all my manuscripts to be read. A nervous fit seized me, and I worked frantically. “How on earth shall I ever find time for all I’ve got to do?” I said to myself, sending the saw into a dead limb with a vicious jab. But I soon discovered that nervous haste wasn’t helping any. In my excitement, I cleaned off all the suckers on a limb, and suddenly realized that I should have left two or three of the strongest to make new wood, as the limb itself was past bearing. I thought of Mike’s reflection, that he kept his thoughts on his gardening. So I calmed down, and gave my whole attention to my work, making a little study of each limb, deciding what I wished to leave for future development, and what would give the best decorative effect to my slope as well. You can really trim an old apple tree into a thing of gnarled power and quaint charm by a little care.

Tap, tap, tap, came the sound of hammers from my house. The plumbers had returned, and I could hear them rattling pipes. The water company was digging for the connections. Now and then a shout from Joe to the horses was wafted down from the plateau. A pair of persistent song sparrows, building in an evergreen by the brook, kept up a steady song. A robin sang in the next tree to me. The sun beat warmly on my neck. And I sawed and pruned, keeping steadily to my job, treating each tree and limb as a separate and important problem, till I heard the hammers cease at noon.

I had almost completed my first row!

As I returned from dinner, Joe was walking the drills in the potato field, dropping the fertilizer, and the bent form of Mike followed immediately behind him, dropping the seed from a basket. Joe walked with a fine, free stride, and dropped the fertilizer from his hand with a perfectly rhythmic gesture. The father’s bent back behind him was an added touch from Millet. But the lone pine and the blue mountains gave a bright, sharp quality to the landscape which was quite unlike Millet. The picture held me, however, as do the Frenchman’s canvases. Even my knowledge of Mike’s comfortable home and happy disposition did not rob it of that subtle pathos of agricultural toil. Why the pathos, I asked myself? Mike is healthy and happy. No toil is more healthful. I’m working as hard as Mike, and having a glorious time! To be sure, I’m working my own land, but Mike, too, has a garden of his own, yet doubtless looks as pathetic in it. I could find no solution, unless it be that instinctive belief of a city-bred civilization that all joys are urban. Just then, however, Mike straightened up with a laugh, and the pathos vanished.

“So the pathos,” thought I, as I caught myself instinctively straightening, too, “is a matter of spinal sympathy!”

This was a most comforting reflection, and I hastened to investigate Hard Cider’s morning work. The kitchen floor was ready to relay. Over the old planking he had spread tar paper, then carefully adjusted a light, half-inch framework, and on top of this was laying the new floor.

“Thet’ll keep out the cold,” he said briefly, carefully lifting the lid of the stove and spitting into the fire pot.

I examined the framework on which he was laying the new floor. It was as carefully jointed as if it were the floor itself.

“Why so much pains with this?” I asked, pointing with my toe.

“Why not?” Hard Cider replied, as the March Hare replied to Alice.

I was braver than Alice. “But it doesn’t show,” I said.

“Somebody might take the floor up,” he retorted, with some scorn.

“Hard Cider, after all, is an artist,” I thought. “He has the artistic conscience–and, being a Yankee, he won’t admit it.”

I went back to my orchard, working with a greater confidence and speed now, born of practice; and I had begun on the second row by five o’clock. Then I walked up to the plateau. Joe was working overtime, covering the drills, while his father was doing the stable work. I staked the three sections of the field containing Early Rose, Dibble’s Russet, and Irish Cobbler respectively, and entered in my notebook the date of planting. It occurred to me then and there to keep a diary of all seeds, soils, fertilizers, and plantings, noting weather conditions and pests during the growing season, and the time, quality, and quantity of harvest. That diary I began the same evening; I have kept it religiously ever since, and I have learned more about agriculture from its pages than from any other book–something I don’t say vainly at all, because it is but the careful tabulation of practical experience, and that is any man’s best teacher.

I picked up a hoe and helped Joe cover drills for half an hour. Thanks to golf and rowing, my hands were already calloused, or I don’t know what would have happened to them in those first days!

Then I walked back to my house. I could not bring myself to leave it. I walked down through the littered orchard to the brook, and planned out a cement dam and a pool. Then I walked back to the south side of the dwelling, and looked out over the slope where my main vegetable farm was to be. The land had been ploughed close up to the house. It would be easy to level it off for a hundred feet or more into a grass terrace, with a rose hedge at the end to shut out the farm, and a sundial in the centre. To the east it would go naturally into an extension of the orchard; to the west it would end at a grape arbour just beyond the farthest woodshed. I would place my garden hotbeds against the sheltered south side of the kitchen, and screen them with a bed of hollyhocks running west from the end of the main house, which extended in a jog some twelve or fifteen feet beyond the kitchen. Thus one end of my pergola veranda would naturally run off into a hollyhock walk, the other into the grassy slope of the orchard, while directly in front of the glass door would be the lawn, the sundial, and then a white bench against the rambler hedge. I saw it all as I stood there, saw it and thrilled to it as a painter must thrill to a new conception; thrilled, also, at the prospect of achieving it with my own hands; thrilled at the thought of dwelling with it all my days. I must have remained there a long time, lost in reverie, for I was very late to supper, and Mrs. Temple was not so cheerful as her wont.

That night I managed to keep awake till eleven, and got some work done. I also rose at a compromise hour of six in the morning, and worked another hour, almost catching up with what should have been my daily stint. But I realized that hereafter I could not work on the farm all day. I must give up my mornings to my manuscript reading.

“Well,” thought I, “I’ll do it–as soon as the orchard is finished.”

As soon as the orchard was finished! I stood amid the litter I had made on the ground, and reflected. I had completed the preliminary trimming of one row and part of a second. There were still over two rows and a half to do. And the worst trees were in those rows, at that. After they were trimmed, there was all the litter to clear out, and the stubs to be painted, and cement work to be done.

“Good gracious!” thought I, “if I do all that, when will I plant, when will I make my lawn?”

Were you ever lost in the woods, so that you suddenly felt a mad desire to rush blindly in every direction, helpless, bewildered, with a horrid sensation that your heart has gone down somewhere into your abdomen? That is the way I suddenly felt toward my farm. I couldn’t afford to employ more labour. Besides, I didn’t want to. I wanted to do the work myself. But there was so much to do!

I stood stock still and pulled myself together. “Rome was not built in a day,” I told myself. “You just take out the worst of the dead wood in those remaining trees now, and finish them another season, or else at odd times during the summer.”

Then one of those things called a still, small voice whispered in my ear: “But you should never begin a new job till you have finished the old. Hoe out your row, my son!”

I recognized the latter words as the catch phrase of a moral story in an ancient reader used in my boyhood school days. Oh, these blighting dogmas taught us in our youth! I resisted the still, small voice, but I felt secretly ashamed. That day I finished the orchard by merely taking out unsightly dead wood and a few of the worst suckers; so that one half of it looked naked and one half bearded, even as the half-shaved hunchback in the “Arabian Nights.” I knew I was doing right, yet I felt I was doing wrong, and in my heart of hearts I was never quite happy for a year, till I had that orchard finished.

Meanwhile, Hard Cider had finished the kitchen floor and cut out the new door frame into the dining-room, while the plumbers had mounted the boiler by the range and begun on the piping. Mike and Joe had been busy on the slope to the south, ploughing the most distant portion for the fodder crops and harrowing in load after load of old stable manure from the barn. The next day would bring them into the garden area, so I staked out my contemplated sundial lawn, allowing a liberal 250 feet, and ran the line westward till it came a trifle beyond the last woodshed, whence I ran it north to the shed for the grape arbour. West of the arbour, on the half acre of slope remaining before the plateau was reached, I planned to set out a new orchard–some day. That same night I filled out an order for fifty rambler roses! “I’ll grow ’em on poles, till I can build the trellises,” said I. Then I sat down to my manuscripts.

The next morning I managed to prod myself out of bed at five-thirty, and found that I could do more work before breakfast than in three hours in the evening. I must confess I was a little annoyed at this verification of a hoary superstition. Personally, I like best to work at night, and some day I shall work at night again. It is a goal to strive for. But you cannot drive your brain at night when you’ve been driving your body all day. That, alas! is a drawback on farming.

Reaching my farm at eight, I found Joe harrowing in manure on the garden and Mike sowing peas.

“Can I have the horse to-morrow?” said I.

“Yez cannot,” said Mike. “Sure, we’ll be another day at the least gettin’ the garden ready.”

“But I want to grade my lawn,” I said. “The day after, then?”

“Maybe,” said Mike. “Yez must make lawns when there’s nothin’ else at all to do.”

“Yes, sir,” I replied, and he grinned.

That sundial lawn had now taken possession of my imagination. My fingers fairly itched to be at it. I lingered fondly on the rough furrowed slope as I crossed to the orchard, and saw a rambler in pink or red glory at each of my stakes, climbing a trellis and making a great, outdoor room for my house. I stepped into the house straightway, and told Hard Cider to order the trellis lumber for me.

Then I went at my orchard. Armed with a gouge, a mallet, a bag of cement, a barrowful of sand, a box for mixing, a trowel, and a pail of carbolic solution, I gouged out a few–only a few–of the worst cavities in the old trunks, washed them, and filled them with cement. It was a slow process, that took me all the morning, and I fear it was none too neatly done, for I had never worked in cement before. Moreover, I will admit that I got frightened at my inexperience, and confined my experiments to three or four cavities. But it was extraordinarily interesting. I found a certain childish fascination in the similarity of the work to a dentist’s filling teeth. If every tree died, I told myself, I would still have been repaid in the fun of doing the job myself. Early in the afternoon I started to paint the scars where limbs had been removed, but changed my mind suddenly, and decided to clean up the litter on the ground first. The orchard looked so disgusting. So for more than three hours I sawed and chopped, chopped and sawed, carted wheelbarrow load after wheelbarrow load of firewood to the shed, and load after load of brush and dead stuff to a heap in the garden. Still the rake brought up more litter from the tangled grass (for the orchard had not been mowed the year before), and still I trundled the barrow back for it.

When six o’clock came I was still carting from the top of the orchard, and for an hour past I had been working with that grim automatism which characterizes the last lap of a two-mile race. There is no joy of creation in clearing up! It is just a grind. And yet it is a part of creation, too, the final stage in the achievement of garden beauty. I wonder if any gardener exists, though, with the imagination so to regard it while he cleans? Certainly I am not the man. I then and there resolved to finish the job by installments, from day to day. Perhaps, taken a little at a time, it would not seem so boresome!

The next morning the smoke of my burning brush pile was coming over the hill as I drew near my farm. The harrow was at work in the garden. Hard’s hammer was ringing from the chamber over the dining-room, which he was converting into a bathroom so that the plumbers could get to work in it. The old orchard trees held up their cropped and denuded tops with a brave show of buds, and I debated with myself what I should do. “Spray!” I decided. So I got a hoe, and started to scrape the trees mildly on the trunks and large lower limbs, while my lime-sulphur mixture was boiling on the stove. I soon found that here, again, I had tackled a job which would require a day, not an hour, so I gave it up, and put the solution in my spraying barrel, summoned Joe to the pump, and sprayed for scale on the unscraped bark. I was by this time getting used to half measures. You have to, when you try to bring up a farm with limited labour!

The wiseacre has now, of course, foreseen that I killed all the young buds. Alas! I am again compelled to spoil a good story, and confess that I didn’t kill any of them. I mixed the lime-sulphur one part to sixty, for I carefully read the warning in my spraying bulletin. I have my doubts whether it was strong enough to kill the scale, certainly not with the bark left on, but at least it was weak enough not to kill the buds, and it was fun applying it.

“There,” I cried, as noon came, “the orchard may rest for the present! Now for the next thing!”

Have you ever watched a small boy picking berries? He never picks a bush clean, but rushes after this or that big cluster of fruit which strikes his eye, covering half an acre of ground while you, perhaps, are stripping a single clump of bushes. And he is usually amazed when your pail fills quicker than his. Alas! I fear I was much like that small boy during my first season on the farm, or at any rate during the first month or two. There was little “efficiency” in my methods–but, oh, much delight!

I fairly gobbled my dinner, and rushed back, a fever of work upon me. Seed beds, that was what I wanted next. As I had planned to put my garden coldframes along the south wall of the kitchen, I decided to make my temporary seed beds there. Mike assented to the plan as a good one, and I had him dump me a load of manure, while I brought earth from the nearest point in the garden, spaded up the soil, mixed in the garden earth and dressing, and then worked and reworked it with a rake, and finally with my hands.

Ah, the joy of working earth with your naked hands, making it ready for planting! The ladies I had seen in their gardens always wore gloves. Even my mother, I recalled, in her little garden, had always worn gloves. Surely, thought I, they miss something–the cool, moist feel of the loam, the very sensations of the seeds themselves. At four o’clock I had my bed ready, and I got my seed packets, sorted them in a tin tobacco box, and began to sow the seeds. The directions which I read with scrupulous care always said, “press the earth down firmly with a board.” I was working with a flat mason’s trowel, so I got up and found a board. It wasn’t half so easy to work with, but I was taking no chances!

“There must,” I grinned, “be some magic efficacy in that board.”

The seeds were not my own selection. They had been chosen for me by Professor Grey’s assistant. That, I confess, was a cloud on my pleasure. Half the fun in sowing flower seeds comes from your hope of achieving those golden promises held out by the seed catalogues–like a second marriage, alas! too often “the triumph of hope over experience”–or else from your memory of some bright bed of the year before.

But the cloud was a small one, after all. I sat in the afternoon sun, beneath my kitchen windows, opening little packets of annuals with grimy fingers that turned the white papers brown, and gently, lovingly, put the seeds into the ground. I had no beds as yet to transplant them to; very often I didn’t know whether they could be transplanted. (As it turned out, I wasted all my poppy seeds.) But I was in no mood to wait. As each little square was sown, I thrust the packet on a stick for a marker, and hitched along to the next square. Bachelors’ buttons, love-in-a-mist, Drummond’s phlox, zinnias, asters, stock, annual larkspur, cosmos, mignonette (of course I lost all that later, as well as the poppies), marigolds, nasturtiums, and several more went into the soil. My border seeds, the sweet alyssum and lobelia, I had sense enough not to plant, and I sowed none of the perennials. But what I put in was enough to keep a gardener busy the rest of the summer. Then I got my new watering-pot, filled it at the kitchen sink, and gently watered the hopeful earth.

Mike and Joe were unhitching the horse from the harrow as I finished. The great brown slope of the vegetable garden, lying away from the house toward the ring of southern hills, was ready for planting. There was my farm, thence would come my profits–if profits there should be. But just at that moment the little strip of soaked seed bed behind me was more important. It stood for the colour box with which I was going to paint, for the fragrant pigments out of which I should create about my dwelling a dream of gardens.

“After all,” I thought, “a country place is but half realized without its garden, even though it be primarily a farm; and the richness of country living is but half fulfilled unless we become painters with shrub and tree and flower. I cannot draw, nor sing, nor play. Perhaps I cannot even write. But surely I can express myself here, about me, in colour and landscape charm, and not be any the worse farmer for that. I have my work; I shall write; I shall be a farmer; I shall be a gardener–an artist in flowers; I shall make my house lovely within; I shall live a rich, full life. Surely I am a happy, a fortunate, man!”

I put the watering-pot back in the shed, crossed the road to the old wooden pump by the barn on a sudden impulse, and pumped water on my hands and head, for I was hot. Mike stood in the barn door and laughed.

“What are yez doin’ that for?” he asked.

I stood up and shook the water from my face and hair. “Just to be a kid, I guess,” I laughed.

There are some things Mike couldn’t understand. Perhaps I did not clearly understand myself. In some dim way an old pump before a barn and the shock of water from its spout on my head was fraught with happy memories and with dreams. The sight of the pump at that moment had waked the echo of their mood.

But as I plodded up the road in the May twilight to supper, one of those memories came back with haunting clearness–a summer day, a long tramp, the tender wistfulness of young love shy at its own too sudden passion, the plunge of cool water from a pump, and then at twilight half-spoken words, and words unspoken, sweeter still!

The amethyst glow went off the hills that ring our valley, and a far blue peak faded into the gathering dusk. A light shivered off my spirit, too. I felt suddenly cold, and the cheery face of Mrs. Temple was the face of a stranger. I felt unutterably lonely and depressed. My farm was dust and ashes. That evening I savagely turned down a manuscript by a rather well-known author, and went to bed without confessing what was the matter with me. The matter was, I had pumped up a ghost.

Chapter V
I AM HUMBLED BY A DRAG SCRAPER

“Could you build me a bookcase, against the wall, just like them, from one to the other and bring it out at right angles five feet into the room from the centre, making it the back of a double settle?” I asked.

“I’m a carpenter,” Hard replied laconically.

“Could you draw me what it would look like first?”

“I ain’t said I wuz an artist,” he answered. “Draw it yerself.”

I took his proffered pencil, and sketched what I wanted on a clean board.

“Yer got too much curve on the base and arms o’ them settles,” he said judicially. “Ain’t no curves in your mantels. You want ’em square, with a panel like them over your fireplaces.”

He took the pencil away from me, and made a quick, neat, accurate sketch of just what I instantly saw I did want.

I shrugged my shoulders. “Go ahead!” said I. “What did you ask me to draw it for in the first place?”

“Folks likes to think they hev their own idees,” he answered.

I turned away, through the new south door, into the May sunshine. The pergola was not commenced. In fact, I had decided not to build it till the following spring. Those beastly painters whom I had forgotten were going to eat up too much of my slender capital. Before me stretched the 250 feet of ploughed slope which was to be my sundial lawn. At the end of it was my line of stakes where the ramblers were to climb. Beyond that was the vegetable garden, newly harrowed and fertilized, where Mike and Joe were busily working, the one planting peas, the other setting out a row of beets. The horse was not in evidence. I could have him at last, to make my lawn! I ran around the house to the stable, clumsily put on his harness, for I was not used to horses, led him to the shed where my tools were stored, hitched him to my new drag scraper, and drove him to the slope.

As I have said, the ground here sloped down eastward toward the brook, and if I was to have a level lawn south of my house, I should have to remove at least two feet of soil from the western end and deposit it on the eastern end. I wisely decided to start close to the house. Hauling at the handles of the heavy scraper and yelling “Back up, there!” at the horse, I got the steel scoop into the ground at the line of my proposed grape arbour, tipped down the blade, and cried, “Giddup!” I hung to the reins as best I could, twisting them about my wrist, and the horse started obediently forward. The scoop did its work very nicely. In fact, it was quite full after we had gone six feet, and I had only to let the horse drag it the remaining ninety-four feet of the proposed width of the lawn, and empty it. Then I went back, and repeated the process. After five repetitions of the same process, the perspicacious reader will have reckoned that I had shaved off something less than half the width of my lawn, on one furrow, and was still a long, long way from being down to the required depth of two feet at the higher end. My arms already ached. As the scraper covered a furrow but two feet wide, that meant 125 furrows to scrape my entire lawn as planned, and at least twenty trips to the furrow. I did some rapid multiplication as I paused to wipe my brow. “Twenty times 125 is 2,500,” thought I. I dropped the reins and moved toward my stakes. I saw that Joe and Mike were looking at me.

“I think,” said I, with some dignity, as I began to pull the stakes up, “that this lawn will look better square. As it’s a hundred feet broad, a hundred feet will be far enough to extend it from the house.”

“Sure,” said Mike, “the big road scraper ’ll be over here to-morrow, scrapin’ the road, and it do be easier an’ quicker to borry that.”

In some ways, I consider this remark of Mike’s, under the circumstances, one of the most gentlemanly I ever heard! And I jumped at his suggestion.

“Mike,” said I, “I’ll admit this job is bigger than I thought. How can I borrow the road scraper?”

“Sure, ain’t me frind Dan Morrissy one o’ the selictmen?” said Mike, “and ain’t he the road boss, and ain’t he willin’ to earn an extra penny for–for the town?”

“H’m,” said I; “for the town! Well, I’ve got to have this lawn! You get your friend Dan in the morning. Just the same, I don’t love the town so much that I want a 250-foot lawn.”

I took my line of stakes back 150 feet, and replanted them. That gave me a more intimate lawn, like a large outdoor south room, I thought. It also increased my vegetable garden acreage. I returned to the scraper and the patient horse with a new humbleness, a new realization of what one man cannot do in a day. That, perhaps, is one of the first and most important lessons of farming and gardening. Once you have learned it, you are either discouraged or fired anew with the persistence of patience. I was not discouraged. Besides, I had Mike’s friend Dan, the selectman, to fall back on! It is always well to be friends with Tammany Hall. First, I decided not to grade even my smaller lawn to a dead level, but merely to smooth it off, letting that process counteract the slope as much as it would. Then I started to scoop again, bringing down the soil from the higher western side directly to the south face of my house and dumping it there, to be packed into a terrace which next season should be the floor of my pergola.

Did you ever try to handle a drag scraper and drive the horse at the same time, dear reader? It requires more muscle and as much patience as golf. Joe offered to come and drive for me, but I preferred him to plant, and kept on by myself. It is amazing how much dirt you can dump in one place without increasing the pile perceptibly. The only thing more amazing is the amount of dirt you can take out of one place without perceptibly increasing the depth of your hole. I ran the scoop along the edge of my proposed grape arbour time after time, dumping the contents in front of my new south door, but still that first furrow didn’t sink more than six inches, and still the sills of my house rose above the piles. Noon came and found me with aching arms and strained shoulder sockets. I had brought some lunch, to save the walk back to Mrs. Temple’s, and I took it into my big south room to eat it. Hard was in there eating his. The plumbers were eating theirs in the new kitchen, already completed.

Hard, I found, had begun the bookcase, which was just the height of the mantels. He had been preparing the top moulding with his universal plane when noon came, and the sweet shavings lay curled on the floor. I scuffed my feet in them, and even hung one from my ear, as children do, while Hard Cider regarded me scornfully.

“I’m going to have great times in this room!” I exclaimed. “Books between the fireplaces, books along the walls, just a few pictures, including my Hiroshiges, over the mantels, my desk by the west window, and out there the green garden! A man ought to write something pretty good in this room, eh?”

Hard looked at me with narrowed eyes. “I don’t know nothin’ about writin’,” he said, “but it ’pears to me a feller could write most anywhar pervided he had somethin’ ter say.”

Whereupon Hard concluded by biting into a large piece of prune pie.

The Yankee temperament is occasionally depressing! I went outdoors again, eating my doughnuts as I walked, and strolled into the vegetable garden to survey the staked rows which denoted beets and peas. Then I went down the slope into my little stand of pines, into the cool hush of them, and unconsciously my brain relaxed in the bath of their peace, and for ten minutes I lay on the needles, neither asleep nor awake, just blissfully vacant. Then I returned to my scooping, marvellously rested.

I scooped till three o’clock, led the horse back to the barn, got a shovel and rake, and began to spread my terrace. As this south end of my house (and accordingly my big south room) was but thirty-three feet long, the task was not very severe, particularly as the upper, or western, end, did not require much grading. I built the terrace out about twelve feet from the wall, stamped up and down on it to pack it, and raked it smooth. I realized that it would settle, of course, and I should need more earth yet upon it before it was sown down to grass, or, if I could afford it, bricked; but in order to hold the bank, I got some grass seed and planted the edge, and also got a couple of planks to stretch from the south door across the terrace and down to the lawn, until I could build my proposed brick path and steps. It was six o’clock when I had finished. Palm-sore and weary, I drank a great tin dipperful of water from my copper pump in the kitchen, took a last look at Hard’s bookcase, which had already been built out the required five feet into the room along the line of the old partition, fourteen inches wide to hold books on both sides, tried the doors to see that they were locked, and tramped up the dusty road to supper.

Mrs. Temple was beaming when I came down from my bath.

“Why so happy?” said I.

“Well,” said she, “in the first place, I’ve got you the housekeeper I want.”

“By which I infer that she’s the one I want, too?” I asked.

“Of course,” said Mrs. Temple, on whom irony had no effect. “She’s Mrs. Pillig, from Slab City, and she’s an artist in pies.”

“Go on; you interest me strangely!” I cried. “Is her husband dead, and has she got a small boy?” (Here I winked at Bert.)

“Pillig ain’t dead, worse luck,” said Mrs. Temple, “but he’s whar he won’t trouble you. I guess Peter won’t trouble you none, neither. He’s a nice boy, and he’ll be awful handy round the place.”

“Peter Pillig!” I exclaimed. “There ain’t no such animal! If there is, Dickens was his grandfather. How old is Peter?”

“Peter’s eleven,” Mrs. Bert replied. “He’s real nice and bright. His mother’s brought him up fine. Anyhow, she was a Corliss.”

“But, eugenically speaking, Peter may have a predisposition to follow in father’s footsteps, which I infer led toward the little green swinging doors,” I protested.

“Speakin’ U. S. A., tommyrot!” said Mrs. Temple. “Anyhow, it’s the door o’ the drugstore in this town. They sell more’n sody water down to Danforth’s.”

“What am I to pay the author of Peter and the pies?” I asked.

“Well, seein’s how you keep Peter, as it were, and Mrs. Pillig calc’lates she can rent her house up to Slab City, she’s goin’ to come to you for $20 a month. She’s wuth it, too. You’ll have the best kept and cleanest house in Bentford.”

I rose from the table solemnly. “Mrs. Temple,” said I, “I accept Mrs. Pillig, Peter, and the pies at these terms, but only on one condition: She is never to clean my study!”

“Why?” asked Mrs. Temple.

“Because,” said I, “you can never tell where an orderly woman will put things.”

Bert chuckled as he filled his pipe. Mrs. Temple grinned herself. I was about to make a triumphant exit, when these words from Mrs. Temple’s lips arrested me:

“Bert,” she said, “did you clean the buggy to-day? You know you gotter go over ter the deepot to-morrow an’ git that boarder.”

“That what?” I cried.

Mrs. Bert’s eyes half closed with a purely feminine delight. “Oh, ain’t I told you?” she said innocently. “We’re goin’ ter hev another boarder, a young lady. From Noo York, too. Her health’s broke down, she says, only that’s not the way she said it, and somehow she heard of us. We ain’t never taken many boarders, but I guess our name’s in that old railroad advertisin’ book. I wouldn’t hev took her, only I thought maybe you wuz kind o’ lonesome here with jest us.”

“Mrs. Temple,” said I, “your solicitude quite overwhelms me. Comfort me with petticoats! Good Lord! And an anæmic, too! I’ll bet she has nerves! When can Mrs. Pillig come to me, woman?”

Mrs. Bert’s eyes closed still farther. “Oh, your house ain’t near ready yet,” she said. “Why, the painters ain’t even began.”

I fled to my chamber, and hauled forth a manuscript. A female boarder! No doubt she’d expect me to shave every day and change my working clothes for the noonday dinner! Heavens! probably she’d come down and advise me how to lay out my garden! So far, I had been blissfully free from advice. I had gone to the village just once–to open my account at the bank. I had not met a soul in the town. One or two of the early arrivals on the estates had driven by in their cars and stared curiously, but I had ignored them. I didn’t want advice. I was having fun in my own way.

“Hang Mrs. Temple!” I muttered, reading a whole paragraph of manuscript without taking in a word of it. In fact, I gave up all attempt to work, and crossly and wearily went to bed, where I lay on one of my strained shoulders and dreamed that a sick female with spectacles was hauling at my arm and begging me to come and rescue her sciatic nerve, which had fallen into my not-yet-built garden pool and was being swallowed by a gold fish.

Chapter VI
THE HERMIT SINGS AT TWILIGHT

The scraper was a large affair with flat-tired iron wheels and a blade eight feet long. It was drawn by four horses, and Mr. Morrissy himself was driving, while a younger man manipulated the levers. We drove in behind the woodshed to the proposed lawn, I explained what I wanted done, and the scraper went to work, with me trotting anxiously alongside, quite useless but convinced that I was helping, like Marceline at the Hippodrome. The way that eight-foot blade, with four horses hauling it, peeled off the old furrows and brought the top soil down from the high side to the low made my poor efforts with the scoop look puny enough. After a few trips it began to look as if my lawn could be fairly level after all. Where I had worked an hour to lower the ground six inches, the scraper accomplished the same result in five minutes and on four times as wide a strip. I soon saw, too, that Mike and Joe were useless in the garden, so long as “frind Morrissy” and his helper were here on the lawn, so I set them to spreading the loose dirt at the lower end, as fast as the scraper brought it down, taking a hand myself. The lawn was shaping up so fast that I began once more to grow expansive.

“It really won’t be square,” thought I, “because my pergola will cut off twelve feet of the length, and if I have flower beds by the roses, they’ll cut off some more. I guess those roses ought to be 112 feet from the house.”

I threw down my shovel, went over to the row of stakes, and moved them south again, twenty-five feet, having added thirteen feet as I walked; then I called out to “frind Morrissy” to bring his scraper.

“Sure,” said Mike, “you’ll get it right yet. But I was goin’ to put me cauliflowers there.”

The scraper went at the new twenty-five foot strip, and in an hour that, too, was down eight inches at the west end and up as much at the east. The lawn still sloped, and though an afternoon with the scraper could probably have put it nearly level, and I was tempted to have it done, Mike pointed out that we were already getting perilously close to the subsoil, and if we went deeper we’d get into tough sledding, and I’d end, besides, by getting a surface which wouldn’t grow grass. So I took his advice, paid “frind Morrissy”–for the town!–as the far-off noon whistle at Slab City blew, and took my lunch down to the brook while the scraper rattled off down the road.

The brook reminded me of the pool I was going to build, and the pool of my dream, and my dream of the new boarder, and then with the patness of a “well-made” play the boarder herself entered, as it were. That is, I heard the buggy coming, and the voice of Bert. I lay down flat behind the tall weeds and grasses, and remained hidden till the buggy had passed.

“Confounded petticoats!” thought I. “Well, if she tries to advise me, I’ll snub her so she won’t try a second time!”

Then I finished my lunch, and lay for a quarter of an hour lazily regarding the sky, a great blue sky with cloud ships floating at anchor in its depths, while the indescribable fragrance of May in moist places filled my nostrils and a song sparrow practised in the alders. As I got up to return to my work, I saw suddenly that the old apple trees in my orchard were showing pink–just a frail hint of it in the veil of young green. A great cumulus cloud piled up like a Himalayan peak in the west beyond my mouse-gray dwelling. To the left, the new lawn was shiny brown, and as I climbed the slopes the smell of it came to me. Out still farther to the left my land was already staked in rows of packed earth, neatly. The scene was beautiful to my eyes, and the imagined beauty of to-morrow made me almost run through the orchard to leave my lunch basket in the kitchen and get my tools for the afternoon’s work.

I had, unfortunately, no roller, but I found in the shed an old piece of tattered carpet, which I tacked on a ten-foot beam, tied a rope to each end, united the two ropes around a stick for a handle, and dragged this improvised smoother back and forth over my lawn, as I had seen the keepers of the dirt tennis courts at college do. It was really surprising how well this smoothed the surface, especially at the lower end where the dirt was loose. It had much less effect on the ground where the scraper had taken off the top soil. After the lawn looked tolerably level to the eye, I brought three loads of manure from the barn, scattered them lightly, and went over the surface with a light tooth harrow. I saw I was not going to get the lawn done that afternoon, for it would have to be “rolled” again. I further realized, as the horse sank into the loose soil at the lower side, that I should have to wait till a rain had settled the earth before I resmoothed it, and could sow my grass seed. At five o’clock, as Joe was leaving the garden, and Mike had gone to the barn to milk the cows, I, too, put up my tools, resolved to enjoy an hour’s loaf–my first since I bought the farm!

I scrubbed my hands and face at the kitchen sink in a tin basin which recalled my childhood, took a long draught from the tin dipper, filled my pipe, and strolled down through the budding orchard toward the brook. The song sparrow was still singing. The cloud ships were still riding at anchor. Even with my pipe in my mouth I could smell the odour of moist places in May. Walking beside the brook, I suddenly found the green spears of an iris plant amid the grasses. A few steps farther on, under the maples, the ground was blue and white with violets and anemones. Then the brook entered the pines, lisping a secret as it went, and I followed it into their cool hush.

I had gone scarcely six paces when I heard the crackle of footsteps on dead twigs somewhere ahead of me, and a moment later the vague form of a woman was visible making her way amid the impeding dead branches. I stood still. She did not see me till she was close up. Then she gave a slight start and said, “I beg your pardon. I trust I am not trespassing.”

I looked at her, while my pipe bowl was hot in my calloused hand. She was scarce more than a girl, I fancied, pale and unmistakably not of this country world. I cannot say how she was dressed, save that she wore no hat and looked white and cool. But I saw that she had very blue eyes on each side of a decidedly tilted nose, and these eyes were unmistakably the kind which twinkle.

“Trespassing is a relative term,” said I, after this, I fear, rather rudely prolonged scrutiny.

“You talk like ’Hill’s Rhetoric,’” she smiled, with a quick glance at the incongruity of my clothes.

“Naturally,” I replied. “It was the text-book I formerly used with my classes.”

There was a little upward gurgle of laughter from the girl. “Clearness, force, and elegance, wasn’t that the great triumvirate?” she said.

“Something like that, I believe,” said I. “I am trying to forget.”

“And are these pines yours to forget in? It should be easy. I was walking out there in the road, and I spied the brook over the wall and climbed through the briers to walk beside it, because it was trying so hard to talk to me. That was wrong of me, perhaps, but I never could resist a brook–nor pine trees. They are such nice old men.”

“Why, then,” I asked, “are the little virgin birches always running away from them?”

Her eyes contracted a second, and then twinkled. “The birches plague them,” she replied.

“How do they plague them?” I demanded.

“Pull their pine needles when they are asleep, of course,” she answered. “Thank you for letting me walk here.”

“Not at all,” said I, “it is always a pleasure to entertain a true naturalist.”

She smiled, and made to pass on. I stood a little aside, in silence. And in that moment of silence suddenly, from near at hand, from somewhere in these very pines, there rang out the golden throb of a hermit thrush so close that the grace notes of his song were audible, cool and liquid and lovely. The suddenness, the nearness, the wildness of this song made it indescribably thrilling, and the girl and I both stood rigid, breathless, peering into the gloom of the pines. Again the call rang out, but a little farther away this time, more plaintive, more fairylike with distance. She took a step as if to follow, and instinctively I put out my hand, grasping her arm to restrain her. So we stood and waited, while from farther still, evidently from the tamaracks in the corner of my lot, came the elfin clarion. The singer was a good one; his attack was flawless, and he scattered his triplets with Mozartian ease and precision. Still we waited, in silence, but he did not sing again. Then in a kind of wonder the girl turned her face to mine, and in a kind of wonder I realized that I was still holding her arm. She appeared as unconscious of it as I, till I let my hand fall. Then she coloured a little, smiled a little, and said, “What was it? I never heard anything so beautiful.”

“A hermit thrush,” I answered. “Thoreau once described his song as ’cool bars of melody from the everlasting morning or evening.’ I think that expresses it as well as words can.”

“I have always wanted to hear a hermit,” she said wistfully. “And, oh, it is lovelier than I dreamed! I am going now before I get too jealous of you for having one all your own.”

“Don’t go!” I said impulsively. “The hermit has never sung for me. That song must have been in your honour.”

The moment when I stood holding her arm, the moment when she had turned her wondering, eager face to mine, had been very pleasant. It was dusk now in the pines, and, looking westward, the low sun was making daggers of light between the trees. My ghost that I had brought up from the pump suddenly walked again, but walked in flesh and blood, with blue eyes and tilted nose. I was undeniably affected. My voice must have betrayed it as I repeated, “Don’t go!”