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The

Jonathan

Papers

By Elisabeth

Woodbridge

By Elisabeth Woodbridge

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

Boston and New York

The Jonathan Papers

The Jonathan Papers

By

Elisabeth Woodbridge

BOSTON AND NEW YORK

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1912, BY ELISABETH WOODBRIDGE MORRIS

TO JONATHAN

AND TO ALL PERFECT COMRADESHIP

WHEREVER ITS JOYOUS SPIRIT IS FOUND

THIS LITTLE BOOK IS DEDICATED

Contents

The papers in this volume first appeared in the Outlook, the Atlantic, and Scribner's. The author wishes to express to the editors of these magazines her appreciation of their courtesy in permitting the republication of the papers.

Foreword

On Taking One's Dessert First

When we were children we used to "happen in" to the kitchen just before luncheon to see what the dessert was to be. This was because at the luncheon table we were not allowed to ask, yet it was advantageous to know, for since even our youthful capacity had its limits, we found it necessary to "save room," and the question, of course, was, how much room?

Discovering some favorite dish being prepared, we used to gaze with watering mouth, and, though knowing its futility, could seldom repress the plea, "Mayn't we have our dessert now?" Of course we never did, of course we waited, and of course, when that same dessert came to us, properly served, at the proper time, after a properly wholesome luncheon preceding, it found us expectant, perhaps, but not eager; appreciative, but not enthusiastic. It was not to us what it would have been at the golden moment when we begged for it.

In hours of unbridled hostility to domestic conditions we used sometimes to plan for a future when we should be grown up, and then would we not change this sorry scheme of things entire! Would we not have a larder, with desserts in it, our favorite desserts—and would we not devour these same, boldly, recklessly, immediately before the meal for which they were intended! Just wouldn't we!

And afterward—just didn't we! Most youthful fancies are doomed to fade unrealized, but this one was too fundamentally practical and sane. We are grown up, we have a larder, with now and then toothsome desserts in it, and now and then we grip our conscience till it cowers and is still, we wait till the servants are out, we walk into our pantry—and then—

Yes, triumphant we still believe what once militant we maintained—that the only way to eat cake is when it is just out of the oven, that the only way to eat ice cream is to dip it out of the freezer, down under the apple tree, in the mid-morning or mid-afternoon. Afterward, when it appears in sober decorum, surrounded by all the appurtenances of civilization, it is a very commonplace affair; out under the apple tree it is ambrosia.

Why not go further? Why not take all our desserts in life when they taste best, instead of at the proper time, when we don't care for them? Desserts are, I suppose, meant to be enjoyed. Why not have them when most enjoyable? I wonder if there is not a certain perverted conscientiousness that leads us to this enforcement of our pleasures. I am myself conscious that I can scarcely ever approach a pleasure with a mind singly bent on enjoyment. I regard it with something like suspicion, I hedge, I hesitate, I defer. What is the motive force here? Is it an inherited asceticism, bidding us beware of pleasure as such? Is it pride, which will not permit us to make unseemly haste toward our desires? Is it a subtle self-gratification, which seeks to add zest, tone, to our delights by postponing them? Is it fear of anticlimax, which makes us save our pleasure for the last thing, that there may be no descent afterward? Certainly the last was the motive in the case of the little boy who, dining out, was given a piece of mince and one of custard pie. He liked the mince best, therefore he saved it until the last, and had just conscientiously finished the custard when his beaming hostess said: "Oh, you like the custard best! Well, dear, you needn't eat the other. Delia, bring another plate for Henry and I'll give him another piece of the custard pie." Pathetic! Yet I confess my sympathy with Henry has always been qualified by disapproval of his methods, which, it seems to me, brought down upon him an awful but not wholly undeserved penalty.

The incident is worth careful attention. For life, I believe, is continually treating us as that benevolent but misguided hostess treated the incomprehensible Henry. If we postpone our mince pie, it is often snatched from us and we never get it at all. I knew a youth once who habitually rode a bicycle that was too small for him. He explained that he continued to do this because then, when at some future time he did have one that fitted him, he would be so surpassingly comfortable! Soon after, bicycles went out of fashion, and I fear the moment of supreme luxury never came. His mince pie had, as it were, been snatched from him. One of my friends wrote me once: "It seems to me I am always distractingly busy just getting ready to live, but I never really begin." Most of us are in the same plight. We are like the thrifty housewife who kept pushing the week's work earlier and earlier, until it backed up into the week before; yet with all her planning she never succeeded in clearing one little spot of leisure for herself. She never got her dessert at all. Probably she would not have enjoyed it if she had had it. For the capacity to enjoy desserts in life is something not to be trifled with. Children have it, and grown people can keep it if they try, but they don't always try. I knew of a man who worked every minute until he was sixty, getting rich. He did get rich. Then he retired; he built him a "stately pleasure palace" and set about taking his pleasure. And lo! he found that he had forgotten how! He tried this and that, indoor and outdoor pleasures, the social and the solitary, the artistic and the semi-scientific—all to no purpose. Here were all the desserts that throughout his life he had been steadfastly pushing aside; they were ranged before him to partake of, and when he would partake he could not. And so he left his pleasure palace and went back to "business."

We are not all so far gone as this, but few of us have the courage to take our desserts when they are offered, or the free spirit to enjoy them to the uttermost. I get up on a glorious summer morning and gaze out at the new day. With all the strongest and deepest instincts of my nature I long to go out into the green beauty of the world, to fling myself down in some sloping meadow and feel the sunshine envelop me and the warm winds pass over me, to see them tossing the grasses and tugging at the trees and driving the white clouds across the blue, and to feel the great earth revolving under me—for if you lie long enough you can really get the sense of sailing through space. All this I long for—from my window. Then I turn back to my unglorified little house—little, however big, compared with the limitless world of beauty outside—and betake myself to my day's routine occupations. I read my mail, I answer letters, I go over accounts, I fly to the telephone and give orders and make engagements. And at length, after hours of such stultifying employment, I elect to call myself "free," and go forth to enjoy my "well-earned" leisure. Fool that I am! As if enjoyment were a thing to be taken up and laid down at will, like a walking-stick. As if one could let the golden moment pass and hope to find it again awaiting our convenience. Why can we not be like Pippa with her one precious day? But if she had been born in New England do you suppose her day would have been what it was? Would she have sprung up at daybreak with heart and mind all alight for pleasure? Certainly not. She would have spent the golden morning in cleaning the kitchen, and the golden afternoon in clearing up the attic, and would have gone out for a little walk after the supper dishes were washed, only because she thought she "ought" to take a little exercise in the open air.

Duty and work are all very well, but we have bound ourselves up in them so completely that we have almost lost the art of spontaneous enjoyment. We can feel comfortable or uncomfortable, annoyed or gratified, but we cannot feel simple, buoyant, instinctive enjoyment in anything. We take our very pleasures under the name of duties— "We ought to take a walk," "We ought not to miss that concert," "We ought to read" a certain book, "We ought" to go and see this friend, or invite that one to see us. Those things that should be our spontaneous pleasures we have clothed and masked until they no longer know themselves. A pleasure must present itself under the guise of a duty before we feel that we can wholly give ourselves over to it.

Ah, let us stop all that! Let us take our pleasures without apology. Let us give up this fashion of shoving them away into the left-over corners of our lives, covering their gleaming raiment with sad-colored robes, and visiting them with half-averted faces. Let us consort with them openly, gayly!

The Jonathan Papers

I

A Placid Runaway

Jonathan and I differ about a great many things; how otherwise are we to avoid the sloughs of bigoted self-satisfaction? But upon one point we agree: we are both convinced that on a beautiful morning in April or May or June there is just one thing that any right-minded person really wants to do. That is to turn a deaf ear to duty and a blind eye to all other pleasures, and—find a trout brook. We are, indeed, able to understand that duty may be too much for him—may be quite indifferent to his deaf ear and shout in the other, or may even seize him by the shoulders and hold him firmly in his place. He may not be able so much as to drop a line in the brown water all through the maddening spring days. But that he should not want to—ache to—this we cannot understand. We do know that it is not a thing to be argued about. It is temperamental, it is in the blood, or it is not. Jonathan and I always want to.

Once it was almost the end of April, and we had been wanting to ever since March had gone out like a lion—for in some parts of New England a jocose legislature has arranged that the trout season shall begin on April Fool's Day. Those who try to catch trout on April first understand the joke.

"Jonathan," I said over our coffee, "have you noticed the weather to-day?"

"Um-m-pleasant day," he murmured abstractedly from behind his newspaper.

"Pleasant! Have you felt the sunshine? Have you smelt the spring mud? I want to roll in it!"

Jonathan really looked up over his paper. "Do!" he said, benevolently.

"Jonathan, let's run away!"

"Can't. There's a man coming at—"

"I know. There's always a man coming. Tell him to come to-morrow. Tell him you are called out of town."

"But you have a lot of things to-day too—book clubs and Japanese clubs and such things. You said last night—"

"I'll tell them I'm called out of town too. I am called—we're both called, you know we are. And we've got to go."

"Really, my dear, you know I want to, but—"

"No use! It's a runaway. Get the time-table and see which is the first train to anywhere—to nowhere—who cares where!"

Jonathan went, protesting. I let him protest. A man should have some privileges.

We took the first train. It was a local, of course, and it trundled jerkily along one of the little rivers we knew. When the conductor came to us, Jonathan showed him our mileage book. "Where to?" he asked mechanically, but stiffened to attention when Jonathan said placidly, "I don't know yet. Where are we going, my dear?"

"I hadn't thought," I said; "let's see the places on the map."

"Well, conductor," said Jonathan, "take off for three stations, and if we don't get off then, you'll find us here when you come around, and then you can take off some more."

The conductor looked us both over. We were evidently not a bridal couple, and we didn't look quite like criminals—he gave us up.

When we saw a bit of country that looked attractive, we got off. That was something I had always wanted to do. All my life I have had to go to definite places, and my memory is full of tantalizing glimpses of the charming spots I have passed on the road and could never stop to explore. This time we really did it. We left the little railway station, sitting plain and useful beside the track, went up the road past a few farmhouses, over a fence and across a soft ploughed field, and down to the little river, willow-bordered, shallow, golden-brown, with here and there a deep pool under an overhanging hemlock or a shelving, fretted, bush-tangled bank.

We sat down in the sun on a willow log and put our rods together. Does anything sound prettier than the whir and click of the reel as one pulls out the line for the first time on an April day? We sat and looked at the world for a little, and let the wind, with just the faint chill of the vanishing snows still in it, blow over us, and the sun, that was making anemones and arbutus every minute, warm us through. It was almost too good to begin, this day that we had stolen. I felt like a child with a toothsome cake— "I'll put it away for a while and have it later."

But, after all, it was already begun. We had not stolen it, it had stolen us, and it held us in its power. Soon we wandered on, at first hastening for the mere joy of motion and the freshness of things; then, as the wind lessened and the sun shone hot in the hollows, loitering more and more, dropping a line here and there where a deep pool looked suggestive. Trout? Yes, we caught some. Jonathan pulled in a good many; I got enough to seem industrious. I seldom catch as many as Jonathan, though he tries to give me all the best holes; because really there are so many other things to attend to. Men seem to go fishing chiefly to catch fish. Jonathan spends half an hour working his rod and line through a network of bushes, briers, and vines, to drop it in a chosen spot in a pool. He swears gently as he works, but he works on, and usually gets his fish. I don't swear, so I know I could never carry through such an undertaking, and I don't try.

I did try once, when I was young and reckless. I headed the tip of my rod, like a lance in rest, for the most open spot I could see. For the fisherman's rule in the woods is not "Follow the flag," but "Follow your tip," and I tried to follow mine. This necessitated reducing myself occasionally to the dimensions of a filament, but I was elastic, and I persisted. The brambles neatly extracted my hat-pins and dropped them in the tangle about my feet; they pulled off my hat, but I pushed painfully forward. They tore at my hair; they caught an end of my tie and drew out the bow. Finally they made a simultaneous and well-planned assault upon my hair, my neck, my left arm, raised to push them back, and my right, extended to hold and guide that quivering, undulating rod. I was helpless, unless I wished to be torn in shreds. At that moment, as I stood poised, hot, baffled, smarting and stinging with bramble scratches, wishing I could swear like a man and have it out, the air was filled with the liquid notes of a wood thrush. I love the wood thrush best of all; but that he should choose this moment! It was the final touch.

I whistled the blue-jay note, which means "Come," and Jonathan came threshing through the brush, having left his rod.

"Where are you?" he called; "I can't see you."

"No, you can't," I responded unamiably. "You probably never will see me again, at least not in any recognizable form. Help me out!" The thrush sang again, one tree farther away. "No! First kill that thrush!" I added between set teeth, as a slight motion of mine set the brambles raking again.

"Why, why, my dear, what's this?" Then, as he caught sight of me, "Well! You are tied up! Wait; I'll get out my knife."

He cut here and there, and one after another, with a farewell stab or scratch, the maddening things reluctantly let go their hold. Meanwhile Jonathan made placid remarks about the proper way to go through brush. "You go too fast, you know. You can't hurry these things, and you can't bully them. I don't see how you manage to get scratched up so. I never do."

"Jonathan, you are as tactless as the thrush."

"Don't kill me yet, though. Wait till I cut this last fellow. There! Now you're free. By George! But you're a wreck!"

That was the last time I ever tried to "work through brush," as Jonathan calls it. If I can catch trout by any method compatible with sanity, I am ready to do it, but as for allowing myself to be drawn into a situation wherein the note of the wood thrush stirs thoughts of murder in my breast—at that point, I opine, sport ceases.

So on that day of our runaway I kept to open waters and preserved a placid mind. The air was full of bird notes—in the big open woods the clear "whick-ya, whick-ya, whick-ya" of the courting yellowhammers, in the meadows bluebirds with their shy, vanishing call that is over almost before you can begin to listen, meadowlarks poignantly sweet, song sparrows with a lift and a lilt and a carol, and in the swamps the red-wings trilling jubilant.

Noon came, and we camped under the sunny lee of a ridge that was all abloom with hepaticas—clumps of lavender and white and rosy-lilac. We found a good spring, and a fallen log, and some dead hemlock tips to start a fire, and soon we had a merry blaze. Then Jonathan dressed some of the trout, while I found a black birch tree and cut forked sticks for broilers. Any one who has not broiled fresh-caught trout outdoors on birch forks—or spice bush will do almost as well—has yet to learn what life holds for him. Chops are good, too, done in that way. We usually carry them along when there is no prospect of fish, or, when we are sure of our country, we take a tin cup and buy eggs at a farmhouse to boil. But the balancing of the can requires a happy combination of stones about the fire that the brief nooning of a day's tramp seldom affords, and baking is still more uncertain. Bacon is good, but broiling the little slices—and how they do shrink!—takes too long, while frying entails a pan. Curiously enough, a pan, in addition to two fish baskets and a landing-net, does not find favor in Jonathan's eyes.

After luncheon and a long, lazy rest on our log we went back to the stream and loitered down its bank. Pussy-willows, their sleek silver paws bursting into fat, caterpillary things, covered us with yellow pollen powder as we brushed past them. Now and then we were arrested by the sharp fragrance of the spice bush, whose little yellow blossoms had escaped our notice. In the damp hollows the ground was carpeted with the rich, mottled green leaves and tawny yellow bells of the adder's-tongue, and the wet mud was sweet with the dainty, short-stemmed white violets. On the dry, barren places were masses of saxifrage, bravely cheerful; on the rocky slopes fragile anemones blew in the wind, and fluffy green clumps of columbine lured us on to a vain search for an early blossom.

As the afternoon waned, and the wind freshened crisply, we guessed that it was milking-time, and wandered up to a farmhouse where we persuaded the farmer's wife to give us bread and cheese and warm new milk. We were urged to "set inside," but preferred to take the great white pitcher of milk out to the steps of the little back porch where we could hear the insistent note of the little phœbe that was building under the eaves of the woodshed. Our hostess stood in the doorway, watching in amused tolerance as we filled and refilled our goblets. They were wonderful goblets, be it said—the best the house afforded. Jonathan's was of fancy green glass, all covered with little knobs; mine was yellow, with a head of Washington stamped on one side, and "God Bless our Country" on the other. Finally the good woman broke the silence— "Guess your mothers ain't never weaned ye." Which we were not in a position to refute.

On our return train we found the same conductor who had taken us out in the morning. As he folded back the green cover of our mileage book he could not forbear remarking, quizzically, "Know how far you're goin' to-night?"

"Jonathan," I said, as we settled to toast and tea before our home fireplace that evening, "I like running away. I don't blame horses."

II

An Unprogressive Farm

Most of our friends, Jonathan's and mine, are occupying their summers in "reclaiming" old farms. We have an old farm, too, but we, I fear, are not reclaiming it, at least not very fast. We have made neither formal gardens nor water gardens nor rose arches; we have not built marble swimming-tanks, nor even cement ones; we have not naturalized forget-me-nots in the brook or narcissus in the meadows; we have not erected tea-houses on choice knolls, and after six years of occupancy there is still not a pergola or a sundial on the place! And yet we are happy.

To be happy on a farm like ours one must, I fancy, be either very old or very unprogressive. While we are waiting to grow comfortably old, we are willing to be considered unprogressive.

Very old and very, very unprogressive is the farm itself. There is nothing on it but old apple trees, old lilac bushes, old rocks, and old associations—and, to be sure, the old red house. But the old rocks, piled on the hillsides, are unfailingly picturesque, whether dark and dripping in the summer rains or silver gray in the summer suns. The lilacs are delightful, too. In June they send wave upon wave of fragrance in through the little windows, penetrating even to the remotest corners of the dim old attic, while all day long about their pale lavender sprays the great yellow and black butterflies hang flutteringly. Best of all is the orchard; the old apple trees blossom prodigally for a brief season in May, blossom in rosy-white, in cream-white, in pure white, in green-white, transforming the lane and the hill-slopes into a bower, smothering the old house in beauty, brooding over it, on still moonlight nights, in pale clouds of sweetness. And then comes a wind, with a drenching rain, and tears away all the pretty petals and buries them in the grass below. But there are seldom any apples; all this exuberance of beauty is but a dream of youth, not a promise of fruitage. Jonathan, indeed, tells me that if we want the trees to bear we must keep pigs in the orchard to root up the ground and eat the wormy fruit as it falls; but under these conditions I would rather not have the apples. The orchard is old; why not leave it to dream and rest and dream again?

The old associations are, I admit, of a somewhat mixed character. There is the romance of the milk-room door, through which, in hoary ages past, the "hired girl," at the ripe age of twelve, eloped with her sixteen-year-old lover; there is the story of the cellar nail, a shuddery one, handed down from a yet more remote antiquity; there are tales of the "ballroom" on the second floor, of the old lightning-riven locust stump, of the origin of the "new wing" of the house—still called "new," though a century old. Not a spot, indoors or out, but has its clustering memories.

Such an enveloping atmosphere of associations, no matter what their quality, in a place where generations have lived and died, is of itself a quieting thing. Life, incrusted with tradition, like a ship weighted with barnacles, moves more and more slowly; the past appears more real than the present. To the old this seems natural and right, to others it is often depressing; but Jonathan and I like it. Our barnacle-clogged ship pleases us—pleases me because I love the slow, drifting motion, pleases Jonathan because—I regret to admit it—he thinks he can get all the barnacles off—and then!—

For, whereas my unprogressiveness is absolute and unqualified, Jonathan's is, I have discovered, tainted by a sneaking optimism, an ineradicable desire and hope of improvement, which, though it does not blossom rankly in pergolas and tea-houses, is none the less there, a lurking menace. It inspired his suggestion regarding pigs in the orchard, it showed itself even more clearly in the matter of the hens.

I have always liked hens. I doubt if mine are very profitable,—the farm is not, in general, a source of profit, and we cherish no delusions about it,—but I do not keep them for pecuniary gain. If they chance to lay eggs, so much the better; if they furnish forth my table with succulent broilers, with nutritious roasters, with ambrosial chicken-pasties, I am not unappreciative; but I realize that all these things might be had from my neighbors' barnyards. What I primarily value my own hens for is their companionship. Talk about the companionship of dogs and cats! Cats walk about my home, sleek and superior; they make me feel that I am there on sufferance. One cannot even laugh at them, their manner is so perfect. Dogs, on the other hand, develop an unreasoning and tyrannous devotion to their masters, which is not really good for either, though it may be morbidly gratifying to sentimental natures.

But hens! No decorous superiority here, no mush of devotion. No; for varied folly, for rich and highly developed perversities, combining all that is choicest of masculine and feminine foible—for this and much more, commend me to the hen. Ever since we came to the farm, my sister the hen has entertained me with her vagaries. Jaques's delight at his encounter with Touchstone is pale compared with mine in their society. Nothing cheers me more than to sit on a big rock in the barnyard and watch the hens walking about. Their very gait pleases me—the way they bob their heads, the "genteel" way they have of picking up their feet, for all the world as though they cared where they stepped; the absent and superior manner in which they "scratch for worms," their gaze fixed on the sky, then cock their heads downwards with an indifferent air, absently pick up a chip, drop it, and walk on! Did any one ever see a hen really find a worm? I never did. There are no worms in our barnyard, anyhow; Jonathan must have dug them all up for bait when he was a boy. I have even tried throwing some real worms to them, and they always respond by a few nervous cackles, and walk past the brown wrigglers with a detached manner, and the robins get them later. And yet they continue to go through all these forms, and we continue to call it "scratching for worms."

Jonathan has nothing to do with my hens except to give advice. One of his hobbies is the establishing of a breed of hens marked by intelligence, which he maintains might be done by careful selection of the mothers. Accordingly, whenever he goes to the roost to pick out a victim for the sacrificial hatchet, he first gently pulls the tail of each candidate in turn, and by the dim light of the lantern carefully observes the nature of their reaction, choosing for destruction the one whose deportment seems to him most foolish. In this way, by weeding out the extremely silly, he hopes in time to raise the general intellectual standard of the barnyard. But he urges that much more might be done if my heart were in it. Very likely, but my heart is not. Intelligence is all very well, but the barnyard, I am convinced, is no place for it. Give me my pretty, silly hens, with all their aimless, silly ways. I will seek intelligence, when I want it, elsewhere.

In another direction, too, Jonathan's optimistic temperament has found little encouragement. This is in regard to the chimney swallows. When we first came, these little creatures were one of my severest trials. They were not a trial to Jonathan. He loved to watch them at dusk, circling and eddying about the great chimney. So, indeed, did I; and if they had but contented themselves with circling and eddying there, I should have had no quarrel with them. I did not even object to their evolutions inside the chimney. At first I took the muffled shudder of wings for distant thunder, and when great masses of soot came tumbling down into the fireplace, I jumped; but I soon grew accustomed to all this. I was even willing to clean the soot out of my neat fireplace daily, while Jonathan comforted me by suggesting that the birds took the place of chimney-sweeps, and that soot was good for rose bushes. Yes, if the little things had been willing to stick to their chimney, I should have been tolerant, if not cordial. But when they invaded my domain, I felt that I had a grievance. And invade it they did. At dawn I was rudely awakened by a rush from the fireplace, a mad scuttering about the dusky room, a desperate exit by the little open window, where the raised shade revealed the pale light of morning. At night, if I went with my candle into a dark room, I was met by a whirling thing, dashing itself against me, against the light, against the walls, in a moth-like ecstasy of self-destruction. In the mornings, as I went about the house pulling up the shades and drawing back the curtains, out from their white folds rushed dark, winged shapes, whirring past my ears, fluttering blindly about the room, sinking exhausted in inaccessible corners. They were as foolish as June bugs, fifty times bigger, and harder to catch. Moreover, when caught, they were not pretty; their eyes were in the top of their heads, like a snake's, their expression was low and cunning. They were almost as bad as bats! Worst of all, the young birds had an untidy habit of tumbling out of the nests down into the fireplaces, whether there was a fire or not. Now, I have no conscientious objection to roasting birds, but I prefer to choose my birds, and to kill them first.

One morning I had gathered and carried out of doors eight foolish, frightened, huddling things, and one dead young one from the sitting-room embers, and I returned to find Jonathan kneeling on the guest-room hearth, one arm thrust far up the chimney. "What are you doing, Jonathan?" The next moment there was the familiar rush of wings, which finally subsided behind the fresh pillows of the bed. Jonathan sprang up. "Wait! I'll get it!" He carefully drew away the pillow, his hand was almost on the poor little quivering wretch, when it made another rush, hurled itself against the mirror, upset a vase full of columbines, and finally sank behind the wood-box. At last it was caught, and Jonathan, going over to the hearth, resumed his former position. "Jonathan! Put him out of doors!" I exclaimed. "Sh-h-h," he responded, "I'm going to teach him to go back the way he came. There he goes! see?" He rose, triumphant, and began to brush the soot out of his collar and hair. I was sorry to dash such enthusiasm, but I felt my resolution hardening within me.

"Jonathan," I said, "we did not come to the farm to train chimney swallows. Besides, I don't wish them trained, I wish them kept out. I don't regard them as suitable for household pets. If you will sink to a pet bird, get a canary."

"But you wouldn't have an old house without chimney swallows!" he remonstrated in tones of real pain.

"I would indeed."

It ended in a compromise. At the top of the chimney Jonathan put a netting over half the flues; the others he left open at the top, but set in nettings in the corresponding flues just above each fireplace. And so in half the chimney the swallows still build, but the young ones now drop on the nettings instead of in the embers, and lie there cheeping shrilly until somehow their parents or friends convey them up again where they belong. And I no longer spend my mornings collecting apronfuls of frightened and battered little creatures. At dusk the swallows still eddy and circle about the chimney, but Jonathan has lost the opportunity for training them. Once more the optimist is balked.

But in these matters I am firm: I do not want the hens made intelligent, or the orchard improved, or the swallows trained. There is, I am sure, matter enough in other parts of the farm upon which one may wreak one's optimism. I hold me to my tidy hearths, my comfortable hens, my old lilacs, and my dreaming apple trees.

III

A Desultory Pilgrimage

Many of our friends seem to be taking automobile trips during the summer months—very rapid trips, since, as they explain, "it strains the machine to go too slowly, you know." Jonathan and I wanted to take a trip too, and we looked about us on the old farm for a conveyance. The closest scrutiny failed to discover an automobile, but there were other vehicles—there was the old sleigh in the back of the woodshed, where the hens loved to steal nests, and the old surrey, shabby but willing, and the business wagon, still shabbier but no less willing; there were the two lumber wagons, one rather more lumbering than the other; and there were also various farming vehicles whose names and uses I have never fathomed, with knives and long raking arrangements, very uncomfortable to step over when hunting in the dark corners of the barns for hens' nests or new kittens.

Moreover, there was Kit, the old bay mare, also shabby but willing. That is, willing "within reason," although it must be admitted that Kit's ideas of what was reasonable were distinctly conservative. The chief practical difference between Kit and an automobile, considered as a motive power, was that it did not strain Kit in the least to go slowly. This we considered an advantage, slow-going being what we particularly wished, and we decided that Kit would do.

For our conveyance we chose the business wagon—a plain box body, with a seat across and room behind for a trunk; but in addition Jonathan put in a shallow box under the seat, nailed to cleats on the bottom of the wagon so that it would not shift and rain would run under it. In this we put the things we needed by the roadside—the camping-kit, drinking-cups, bait-boxes, camera, and so on. Then we stowed our trout rods and baskets, and one morning in June we started.

Our plan was to drive and fish through the day, cook our own noon meal, and put up at night wherever we could be taken in, avoiding cities and villages as far as possible. Beyond that we had no plan. Indeed, this was the best of it all, that we did not have to get anywhere in particular at any particular time. We did not decide on one day where we would go the next; we did not even decide in the morning where we would go in the afternoon. If we found a brook where the trout bit, and there was no inhospitable "poster" warning us away, we said, "Let's stay! who cares whether we get on or not?" And we tied Kit to a tree, took out our rods and baskets, and followed the brook. If noon found us still fishing, we came back to the wagon, fed Kit, got out our camping-outfit, and cooked our fish for luncheon. It did not take long. I collected kindling and firewood while Jonathan was laying a few big stones for a fireplace shaped like a squared letter "C," open towards the wind and big enough to hold our frying-pan. Then we started the fire, and while it was settling into shape Jonathan dressed the fish and cut a long stick to fit into the hollow handle of the frying-pan, and I had time to slice bits of pork and set out the rest of the luncheon—bread and butter, milk if we happened to have passed a dairy farm, a pineapple or oranges if we happened to have met a peddler, strawberries if we had chanced upon one of the sandy spots where the wild ones grow so thickly.

Then the pan was set over, the pork was laid in, and soon the little fish were curling up their tails in the fragrant smoke. If they were big and needed long cooking, I had time to toast bread or biscuit in the embers underneath for an added luxury, and when all was ready we sat down in supreme contentment. And we never forgot to give Kit a lump of sugar, or some clover tops, that she might share in the picnic. But every now and then she would turn and regard us with eyes that expressed many things, but chiefly wonder at the queerness of folks who could prefer not to go back to their own stable to eat. When luncheon was over, the dishes washed in the brook, and the wagon repacked, we ambled on, leaving our little fireplace, with its blackened stones and its heart of gray ashes.

No one who has never tried such an aimless life can realize its charm and its restfulness. Most of us spend our days catching trains, and running to the telephone, and meeting engagements. Even our pleasures are seldom emancipated from these requirements; they are dependent on boats and trolley cars and trains, they are measured out in hours and minutes, and we snatch them running, as the Israelites did their water. But this trip of ours was bounded only by the circle of the week, and conditioned only by the limitations of Kit. No one could telephone to us, even at night, because no one knew where we were to be. As for trains, we never once saw one. Now and then we heard one whistle, so far away that it merely emphasized its own remoteness, and a few times we were compelled to cross over or under a track—a very little track, and single at that; beyond this our connection with the symbol of Hurry did not go.

The limitations of Kit were indeed definite and insurmountable. While her speed on a level was most moderate, uphill it was actually glacial, and going downhill it was little better. For Kit had come from the level West, and being, as we have said, conservative, she could never reach any real understanding of hills. She was willing and conscientious, but prudent, and although she went downhill when she was requested to, she did it very much as an old lady might go down a precipice—she let herself down, half sitting, with occasional gentle groans, rocking from side to side like a boat in a chop sea. Now all New England is practically either uphill or downhill, and, if we had been in any haste, these characteristics of Kit might have annoyed us; but inasmuch as we did not care where we went or when we got there, what difference did it make? In fact, it was rather a relief to be thus firmly bound to sobriety.

In one respect we could not be absolutely irresponsible, however. We found it advisable to seek out our night's lodging while it was yet light enough for the farmer's wife to look us over and see that we were respectable. Our first night out we failed to realize this, and we paid for it by being forced to put up at a commonplace village inn, instead of a farmhouse. After that we managed to begin our search for a hostess about milking-time, and we had little further trouble. Indeed, one of the pleasures of the week was the hospitality we received; and our opinion of the New England farmer, his wife and his children, grew higher as the days passed. Courteous hospitality, or, if hospitality had to be withheld, courteous regret, was the rule. Twice, when one house could not take us in, they telephoned—for the telephone is everywhere now—about the neighborhood among friends until they found a lodging for us. And pleasant lodgings they always proved.

One exception there was. We drew up one afternoon by a well-kept little house with a good English name on the post-box, and, as usual, I held the reins while Jonathan went up to the side door to make inquiries. After he had started up the path I saw, from my vantage-point, the lady of the farm returning from her "garden patch," and my heart went out in pity to Jonathan. If I could have called him back I would have done so, merely on the testimony of the lady's gait and figure. I had never fully realized how expressive these could be. Her hips, her shoulders, the set of her head, the way she planted her feet on the uneven flagging-stones of the path, each heavy line and each sodden motion, bespoke inhospitality, intolerance, impenetrable disapproval of everything unfamiliar. I watched Jonathan turn back from the door at the sound of her steps, and in the short colloquy that followed, though I could hear nothing, I could see those hips and shoulders settling themselves yet more decisively, while Jonathan's attitude grew more studiously courteous. But when he had lifted his hat again and turned from that monument of immobile unpleasantness I saw his face relax into lines, partly of amusement, partly of chagrin; and as he took his seat beside me and drove on, he murmured snatches of quotation—"No; couldn't possibly," "No; don't know anybody that could," "No; never did such a thing," "No; the people in the next house've just had a funeral; sure they couldn't"; and finally he broke into a chuckle as he quoted, "Well, there is some folks about two mile down might mebbe take ye; they does sometimes harbor peddlers 'n' such like." Jonathan was hardly willing to try again so near by; he regarded the whole neighborhood as tainted. Yet it was little more than two miles beyond, on that same afternoon, that we found lodgings with the most delightful, the most hospitable friends of all—for friends they became, taking us into their circle as if we belonged to it by right of birth, coddling us as one ought never to expect to be coddled save by one's own mother or grandmother.

Ostensibly, our drive was a trout-fishing trip, and part of the fun certainly was the fishing. Not that we caught so many. If we had seriously wished to make a score, we might better have stayed at home and fished in our own haunts, where we knew every pool and just how and when to fish it. But it was interesting to explore new brooks, and as we never failed to get enough trout for at least one meal a day, what more could we wish? And such brooks! New England is surely the land of beautiful brooks. They are all lovely—the meadow brooks, gliding silently beneath the deep-tufted grasses, where the trout live in shadow even at noonday, and their speckled flanks are dark like the pools they lie in; the pasture brooks, whose clear water is always golden from the yellow sand and pebbles and leaves it ripples over, and the trout are silvery and pale-spotted; the brooks of the deep woods, where the foam of rapids and the spray of noisy little waterfalls alternate with the stillness of rock-bound, hemlock-shadowed pools. All the brooks we followed, whether with good luck or with bad, I remember with delight. No, all except one. But I do not blame the brook.

It happened in this way: One Monday morning, after an abstemious Sunday, the zeal of Jonathan brought us forth at dawn—in fact, a little before dawn. I had consented, because, although my zeal compared to Jonathan's is as a flapping hen compared to a soaring eagle, yet I reflected that I should enjoy the sunrise and the early bird-songs. We emerged, therefore, in the dusk of young morning, and I had my first reward in a lovely view of meadows half-veiled in silvery mist, where the brook wound, and upland pastures of pale gray-green against ridges of shadowy woods. But I was not prepared for the sensation produced by the actual plunge into those same meadows. I say plunge advisedly. I shiver yet as I recall the icy chill of that dew-drenched grass. It was worse than wading a brook, because there was no reaction. Jonathan, however, did not seem depressed by it, so I followed his eager steps without remark. We reached the brook, we put our rods together, and baited. "Crawl, now," admonished Jonathan; "they're shy fellows in those open pools." We crawled, dropped in, and waited. My teeth were chattering, my lips felt blue, but I would not be beaten by a little wet grass. After a few casts, Jonathan murmured, "That's funny," and moved cautiously on to the next pool. Then he tried swift water, then little rapids. I proceeded in chilly meekness, glad of a chance at a little exercise now and then when we had to climb around rocks or over a stone wall. Occasionally I straightened up and gazed out over the meadows—those clammy meadows—and up toward the high woods, brightening into the deep greens of daylight. The east was all rose and primrose, but I found myself unable to think of the sun as an æsthetic feature; I longed for its good, honest heat. A stove, or a hot soapstone, would have done as well.

After a quarter of a mile of this I ventured a remark—"Jonathan, you have often told me of the delights of dawn fishing." Jonathan was extricating his line from an alder bush, and did not answer. I could not resist adding, "I think you said that the trout—bit—at dawn." Continued silence warned me that I had said enough, and I tactfully changed the subject: "What I am sorry for is the birds' nests up in those fields. How do the eggs ever hatch—in ice water! And how do the strawberries ever ripen, in cold storage every night—ugh! Let's go back and get some hot coffee and go to bed!"

And that is my one experience with dawn fishing. But Jonathan, reacting from the experience with the temper of the true enthusiast, still maintains that trout do bite at dawn. Perhaps they do. But for me, no more early-dewy meadows, except to look at.

Those hours of dawn fishing were the hardest work I did during the week. A lazy week, in truth, and an irresponsible one. Every one who can should snatch such a week and see what it does for him. In some ways it was better than camping, because camping, unless you have guides, is undoubtedly hard work, especially if you keep moving—work that one would never grudge, yet hard work nevertheless. The omitting of the night camp cut out practically all the work and made it more comfortable for the horse, while our noon camps made us independent all day, and gave us that sense of being at home outdoors that one never gets if one has to run to cover for every meal.

And, curiously enough, the spots that seem homelike to me, as I linger in memory among the scenes of that week, are not the places where we spent the nights, pleasant though they were, but rather the spots where we built our little fireplaces. Each was for an hour our hearth-fire,—our own,—and I do not forget them,—some beside the open road, one on a ridge where the sun slants across as it goes down among purpling hills; one in the deep woods, by a little trout brook, where the sound of running water never ceases; one in an open grove by the river we love best, where a tiny brook with brown pools full of the shadowy trout empties its cold waters into the big, warm current. Perhaps no one else may notice them, but they are there, waiting for us, if haply we may pass that way again. And if we do, we shall surely pause and give them greeting.

IV

The Yellow Valley

We were on our way to the Yellow Valley. We had been pushing against the wind, through the red March mud of a ploughed field. Mud is a very good thing in its place, and if its place is not a ploughed field in March, I know of no better. But it does not encourage lightness of foot. At an especially big and burly gust of wind I stopped, turned my back for respite, and dropped into the lee of Jonathan. Wind is a good thing, too, in its place, but one does not care to drown in it.

"Jonathan," I gasped, "this isn't spring; it's winter of the most furious description. Let's reform the calendar and put up signs to warn the flowers. But I want my spring! I want it now!"

"Well," said Jonathan, "there it is. Look!" And he pointed across the brush of the near fence line, where a meadow stretched away, brown with the stubble and matted tangle of last year's grass. Halfway up the springy slope, in a little fold of the hillside, was a shimmer of green—vivid, wonderful.

I forgot the wind. "Oh-h! Think of being a cow now and eating that! Eating spring itself!"

"If you were a cow," said Jonathan, with the usual masculine command of applicable information, "they wouldn't let you eat it."

"They wouldn't! Why not? Does it make them sick?"

"No; crazy."

"Crazy!"

"Just that. Crazy for grass. They won't touch hay any more, and there isn't enough grass for them—and there you are!"

"Did you make that up as you went along, Jonathan?"

"Ask any farmer."

But I think I will not ask a farmer. He might say it was not true, and I like to think it is. I am sorry the cows cannot have their grass, but glad they have the good taste to refuse hay. I should, if I were a cow. Not being one, I do not need an actual patch of green nibble to set me crazy. The smell of the earth after a thaw, a breath of soft air, a wave of delicious sweetness, in April, in March, in February,—when it comes in January I harden my heart and try not to notice,—this is enough to spoil me for the dry fodder of winter. Hay may be good and wholesome, but I have had my taste of spring grass, and it is enough. That or nothing. No more hay for me!

What that strange sweetness of the early spring is I have never fully discovered. The fragrance of flowers is in it,—hepaticas, white violets, arbutus,—yet it is none of these. It comes before any of the flowers are even astir, when the arbutus buds are still tight little green points, when the hepaticas have scarcely pushed open their winter sheaths, while their soft little gray-furred heads are still tucked down snugly, like a bird's head under its wing. Before even the snowdrops at our feet and the maples overhead have thought of blossoming, a soft breath may blow across our path filled with this wondrous fragrance. It is like a dream of May. One might believe the fairies were passing by.

For years I was completely baffled by it. But one March, in the farm orchard, I found out part of the secret. I was planting my sweet peas, when the well-remembered and bewildering fragrance blew across me. I sprang up and ran up the wind, and there, in the midst of the old orchard, I came upon an old apple tree just cut down by the thrift of Jonathan's farmer, who has no silly weakness for old apple trees. The fresh-cut wood was moist with sap, and as I bent over it—ah, there it was! Here were my hepaticas, my arbutus, here in the old apple tree! Such a surprise! I sat down beside it to think it over. I was sorry it was cut down, but glad it had told me its secret before it was made into logs and piled in the woodshed. Blazing in the fireplace it would tell me many things, but it might perhaps not have told me that.

And so I knew part of the secret. But only part. For the same fragrance has blown to me often where there were no orchards and no newly felled apple trees, and I have never, except this once, been able to trace it. If it is the flowing sap in all trees, why are not the spring woods full of it? But they are not full of it; it comes only now and then, with tantalizing capriciousness. Do sound trees exhale it, certain kinds, when the sap starts, or must they have been cut or bruised, if not by the axe, perhaps by the winter winds and the ice storms? I do not know. I only know that when that breath of sweetness comes, it is the very breath of spring itself; it is the call of spring out of winter—spring grass.

When the call of the spring grass comes, there is always one spot that draws me with a special insistence, and every year we have much the same talk about it.

"Jonathan," I say, "let's go to the Yellow Valley."

"Why," says Jonathan, "there will be more new birds up on the ridge."

"I don't care about new birds. The old ones do very well for me."

"And you might find the first hepaticas under Indian Rock."

"I know. We'll go there next."

"And if we went farther up the river, we might see some black duck."

"Very likely; but I don't feel as if I particularly had to see black duck to-day."

"What do you have to see?"

"Nothing special. Just plain spring."

That is the charm of the Yellow Valley. It offers no spectacular inducements, no bargain-counter attractions in the shape of new arrivals among the birds or flowers. One returns from it with no trophies of any kind, nothing to put down in one's notebook, if one keeps a notebook,—from which industry may I be forever preserved! But it is a place to go to and be quiet, which is good for us all, especially in the springtime, when there is so much going on in the world, and especially lately, since "nature study" has driven people into being so unceasingly busy when they are outdoors. Opera-glasses and bird books have their place, no doubt, in the advance of mankind, but they often seem to me nothing but more machinery coming in between us and the real things. Perhaps it was once true that when people went out to view "nature," they did not see enough. Now, I fancy, they see too much; they cannot see the spring for the birds. Their motto is that of Rikki-Tikki, the mongoose, "Run and find out"—an excellent motto for a mongoose,—but for people on a spring ramble!

The unquenchable ardor of the bird lover, so called, fills me with dismay. One enthusiast, writing in a school journal, describes the difficulties of following up the birds: "Often eyes all around one's head, with opera-glasses focused at each pair, would not suffice to keep the restless birds in view." If this is the ideal of the bird lover, it is not mine. I wonder she did not wish for extra pairs of legs to match each set of eyes and opera-glasses, and a divisible body, so that she might scamper off in sections after all these marvels. For myself, one pair of eyes gives me, I find, all the satisfaction and delight I know what to do with, and I cannot help feeling that, if I had more, I should have less. The same writer speaks of the "maddening" warbler notes. Why maddening? Because, forsooth, there are thirty warblers, and one cannot learn all their names. What a pity to be maddened by a little warbler! And about a matter of names, too. After all, the bird, the song, is the thing. And it seems a pity to carry the chasing of bird notes quite so far. They are meant, I feel sure, to be hearkened to in quietness of spirit, to be tasted delicately, as one would a wine. The life of the opera-glassed bird hunter, compared to mine, seems to me like the experience of a tea-taster compared to that of one who sits in cozy and irresponsible enjoyment of the cup her friend hands her.

And so there always comes a time in the spring when I must go to my Yellow Valley. A car ride, a walk on through plain little suburbs, a scramble across fields to a seldom-used railway track, a swing out along the ties, then off across more fields, over a little ridge, and—there! Oh, the soft glory of color! We are at the west end of a miniature valley, full of afternoon sunlight slanting across a level blur of yellows and browns. On one side low brown hills enfold it, on the other runs a swift little river, whose steep farther bank is overhung with hemlocks and laurel in brightening spring green. It is a very tiny valley,—one could almost throw a stone across it,—and the whole bottom is filled with waving grass, waist-high, of a wonderful pale straw color; last year's grass, which the winter snows never seem to mat down, thick-set with the tall brown stalks of last year's goldenrod and mullein and primrose. The trees and bushes are dwarf oaks, with their old leafage still clinging in tawny masses, and willows, with their bunches of slim, yellow shoots. Even the little river is yellow-brown, from the sand and pebbles and leaves of its bed, and the sun, as it slants down the length of the valley, wraps it in a warm, yellow haze.

I call the valley mine, for no one else seems to know it. The long grass is never cut, but left to wave its glory of yellow all through the fall and winter and spring. There is a little footpath running through it, but I never see any one on it. I often wonder who makes all the footpaths I know, where no one ever seems to pass. Is it rabbits, or ghosts? Whoever they may be, in this case they do not trouble me, and the valley is as much mine as though I had cut it out of a mediæval romance.

It is always very quiet here. At least it seems so, though full of sound, as the world always is. But its sounds are its own; perhaps that is the secret; the rustle of the oak leaves as the wind fumbles among them; the swish-swish of the long dry grasses, which can be heard only if one sits down in their midst, very still; the light, purling sounds of the river; the soft gush of water about some bending branch as its tip catches and drags in the shifting current. The winds lose a little of their fierceness as they drop into the valley, and they seem to have left behind them all the sounds of the outer world which they usually bear. If now and then they waft hitherward the long call of a locomotive, they soften it till it is only a dreamy reminder.

It is strange that in a spot so specially full of the tokens of last year's life,—the dry grasses, the old oak leaves not yet pushed off by the new buds,—where the only green is of the hemlocks and laurels that have weathered the winter,—it is strange that in such a spot one should feel the immanence of spring. Perhaps it is the bluebird that does it. For it is the bluebird's valley as well as mine. There are other birds there, but not many, and it is the bluebird which best voices the spirit of the place. Most birds in the spring imply an audience. The song sparrow, with the lift and the lilt of his song, sings to the universe; the red-wing calls to all the sunny world to be gleeful with him; the long-drawn sweetness of the meadowlark floats over broad meadows and wide horizons; the bobolink, in the tumbling eagerness of his jubilation, is for every one to hear. But the bluebird sings to himself. His gentle notes, not heard but overheard, are for those who listen softly. And in the Yellow Valley he is at home.

I am at home, too, and I find there something that I find nowhere else so well. Its charm is in the simpleness of its appeal:—

"Only the mightier movement sounds and passes,
Only winds and rivers—"

I bring back from it a memory of sunshine and grass, bird notes and running water, the broad realities of nature. Nay, more than a memory—a mood that holds—a certain poise of spirit that comes from a sense of the largeness and sweetness and sufficiency of the whole live, growing world. Spring grass—the rare fragrance of the spring air—is the call. The Yellow Valley holds the answer.

V

Larkspurs and Hollyhocks

"Jonathan, let's not have a garden."

"What'll we live on if we don't?"

"Oh, of course, I don't mean that kind of a garden,—peas and potatoes and things,— I mean flowers. Let's not have a flower garden."

"That seems easy enough to manage," he ruminated; "the hard thing would be to have one."

"I know. And what's the use? There are always flowers enough, all around us, from May till October. Let's just enjoy them."

"I always have."

I looked at him to detect a possible sarcasm in the words, but his face was innocent.

"Well, of course, so have I. But what I mean is—people when they have a country place seem to spend such a lot of energy doing things for themselves that nature is doing for them just over the fence. There was Christabel Vincent last summer, grubbing over yellow lilies, or something, and I went over into the meadow and got a lovely armful of lilies and brought them in, and no grubbing at all."

"Perhaps grubbing was what she was after," said Jonathan.

"Well, anyway, she talked as if it was lilies."

"I don't know that that matters," he said.

Jonathan is sometimes so acute about my friends that it is almost annoying.

This conversation was one of many that occurred the winter before we took up the farm. We went up in April that year, and we planted our corn and our potatoes and all the rest, but no flowers. That part we left to nature, and she responded most generously. From earliest spring until October—nay, November—we were never without flowers: brave little white saxifrage and hepaticas, first of all, then bloodroot and arbutus, adder's-tongue and columbine, shad-blow and dogwood, and all the beloved throng of them, at our feet and overhead. In May the pink azalea and the buttercups, in June the laurel and the daisies and—almost best of all—the dear clover. In summer the deep woods gave us orchids, and the open meadows lilies and black-eyed Susans. In September the river-banks and the brooks glowed for us with cardinal-flower and the blue lobelia, and then, until the frosts settled into winter, there were the fringed gentians and the asters and the goldenrod. And still the half has not been told. If I tried to name all that gay company, my tale would be longer than Homer's catalogue of the ships.

In early July a friend brought me in a big bunch of sweet peas. I buried my face in their sweetness; then, as I held them off, I sighed.

"Oh, dear!" I said.

"What's 'oh, dear'?" said Jonathan, as he took off his ankle-clips. He had just come up from the station on his bicycle.

"Nothing. Only why do people have magenta sweet peas with red ones and pink ones—that special pink? It's just the color of pink tooth-powder."

"You might throw away the ones you don't like."

"No, I can't do that. But why does anybody grow them? If I had sweet peas, I'd have white ones, and pale lavender ones, and those lovely salmon-pink ones, and maybe some pale yellow ones—"

"Sweet peas have to be planted in March," said Jonathan, as he trundled his wheel off toward the barn.

"Of course," I called after him, "I'm not going to plant any. I was only saying if."

Perhaps the sweet peas began it, but I really think the whole thing began with the phlox.

One afternoon in August I walked down the road through the woods to meet Jonathan. As he came up to me and dismounted I held out to him a spray of white phlox.

"Where do you suppose I found it?" I asked.

"Down by the old Talcott place," he hazarded.

"No. There is some there, but this was growing under our crab-apple trees, right beside the house."

"Well, now, it must have been some of Aunt Deborah's. I remember hearing Uncle Ben say she used to have her garden there; that must have been before he started the crab orchard. Why, that phlox can't be less than forty years old, anyway."

"Dear me!" I took back the delicate spray; "it doesn't look it."

"No. Don't you wish you could look like that when you're forty?" he philosophized; and added, "Is there much of it?"

"Five or six roots, but there won't be many blossoms, it's so shady."

"We might move it and give it a chance."

"Let's! We'll dig it up this fall, and put it over on the south side of the house, in that sunny open place."

When October came, we took Aunt Deborah's phlox and transplanted it to where it could get the sunshine it had been starving for all those years. I sat on a stump and watched Jonathan digging the holes.

"You don't suppose Henry will cut them down for weeds when they come up, do you?" I said.

"Seems probable," said Jonathan. "You might stick in a few bulbs that'll come up early and mark the spot."

"Oh, yes. And we could put a line of sweet alyssum along each side, to last along after the bulbs are over."

"You can do that in the spring if you want to. I'll bring up some bulbs to-morrow."

The winter passed and the spring came—sweet, tormenting.

"Jonathan," I said at luncheon one day, "I got the sweet alyssum seed this morning.

"Sweet alyssum?" He looked blank. "What do you want sweet alyssum for? It's a foolish flower. I thought you weren't going to have a garden, anyway."

"I'm not; but don't you remember about the phlox? We said we'd put in some sweet alyssum to mark it—so it wouldn't get cut down."

"The bulbs will do that, and when they're gone it will be high enough to show."

"Well, I have the seed, and I might as well use it. It won't do any harm."

"No. I don't believe sweet alyssum ever hurt anybody," said Jonathan.

That evening when he came in I met him in the hall. I had the florist's catalogue in my hand. "Jonathan, it says English daisies are good for borders."

"Borders! What do you want of borders?"

"Why, up on the farm—the phlox, you know."

"Oh, the phlox. I thought you had sweet alyssum for a border."

He took off his coat and I drew him into the study.

"Why, yes, but that was such a little package. I don't believe there would be enough. And I thought I could try the English daisies, too, and if one didn't do well perhaps the other would. And look what it says— No, never mind the newspaper yet—there isn't any news—just look at this about pansies."

"Pansies! You don't want them for a border!"

"Why, no, not exactly. But, you see, the phlox won't blossom till late August, and it says that if you plant this kind of pansies very early, they blossom in June, and then if you cover them they live over and blossom again the next May. And pansies are so lovely! Look at that picture! Don't you love those French-blue ones?"

"I like pansies. I don't know about the nationalities," said Jonathan. "Of course, if you want to bother with them, go ahead." He picked up his paper.

"Oh, it won't be any bother. They take care of themselves. Please, your pencil— I'm going to mark the colors I want."

We went up soon after to look at the farm. We found it very much as we had left it, except that there hung about it that indescribable something we call spring. We tramped about on the spongy ground, and sniffed the sweet air, and looked at the apple buds, and kicked up the soft, matted maple leaves to see the grass starting underneath.

"Oh, Jonathan! Our bulbs!" I exclaimed. We hurried over to them and lifted up the thick blanket of leaves and hay we had left over them. "Look! A crocus!" I said.

"And here's a snowdrop! Let's take off these leaves and give them a chance."

"Dear me!" I sighed; "isn't it wonderful? To think those hard little bullets we put in last fall should do all this! And here's the phlox just starting—look—"

"Oh, you can't kill phlox," said Jonathan imperturbably.

"All the better. I hate not giving people credit for things just because they come natural."

"That is a curious sentence," said Jonathan.

"Never mind. You know what I mean. You've understood a great many more curious ones than that. Listen, Jonathan. Why couldn't I put in my seeds now? I brought them along."

"Why—yes—it's pretty early for anything but peas, but you can try, of course. What are they? Sweet alyssum and pansy?"

"Yes—and I did get a few sweet peas too," I hesitated. "I thought Henry hadn't much to do yet, and perhaps he could make a trench—you know it needs a trench."

"Yes, I know," said Jonathan. I think he smiled. "Let's see your seeds."

"They're at the house. Come over to the south porch, where it's warm, and we'll plan about them."

I opened the bundle and laid out the little packets with their gay pictures indicating what the seeds within might be expected to do. "Sweet alyssum and pansies," I said, "and here are the sweet peas."

Jonathan took them—"'Dorothy Eckford, Lady Grisel Hamilton, Gladys Unwin, Early Dawn, White Spencer,' By George! you mean to keep Henry busy! Here's ten ounces of peas!"

"They were so much cheaper by the ounce," I murmured.

"And—hold up! Did you know they gave you some asters? These aren't sweet peas."

"No—I know—but I thought—you see, sweet peas are over by August, and asters go on all through October—don't you remember what lovely ones Christabel had?"

"Hm! But isn't the world full of asters, anyway, in September and October, without your planting any more?" He grinned a little. "I thought that was your idea—you said Christabel grubbed so."

"Why, yes; but asters aren't any trouble. You just put them in—"

"And weed them."

"Yes—and weed them; but I wouldn't mind that."

"But here's some larkspur!"

"Yes, but I didn't buy that," I explained, hurriedly. "Christabel sent me that. She thought I might like some from her garden—she has such lovely larkspurs, don't you remember? And I just brought them along."

"Yes. So I see. Is that all you've just brought along?"

"Yes—except the cosmos. The florist advised that, and I thought there might be a place for it over by the fence. And of course we needn't use it if we don't want to. I can give it to Mrs. Stone."

"But here's some nasturtiums!"

"Oh—I forgot about them—but I didn't buy them either. They came from the Department of Agriculture or something. There were some carrots and parsnips, and things like that, too, all in a big brown envelope. I knew you had all the other things you wanted, so I just brought these. But of course I don't have to plant them, either."

"But you don't like nasturtiums. You've always said they made you think of railway stations and soldiers' homes—"

"Well, I did use to feel that way,—anchors and crosses and rock-work on big shaved lawns,—and, besides, nasturtiums always seemed to be the sort of flowers that people picked with short stems, and tied up in a wad, and stuck in a blue-glass goblet, and set on a table with a red cover on it. I did have horrible associations with nasturtiums."

"Then why in thunder do you plant them?"

"I only thought—if there was a drought this summer—you know they don't mind drought; Millie Sutphen told me that. And she had a way of cutting them with long stems, so they trailed, and they were really lovely. And then—there the package was—I thought it wouldn't do any harm to take it."

"Oh, you don't have to apologize," said Jonathan. "I didn't understand your plan, that was all. I'll go and see Henry about the trench."

I sat on the sunny porch and the March wind swept by the house on each side of me. I gloated over my seed packets. Would they come up? Of course other people's seeds came up, but would mine? It was very exciting. I pinched open a corner of the Lady Grisel Hamiltons and poured some of the pretty, smooth, fawn-colored balls into my hand. Then I opened the cosmos—what funny long thin ones! How long should I have to wait till they began to come up? I read the directions—"Plant when all danger from frost is past." Oh, dear! that meant May—another whole month! Well, I would get in my sweet peas and risk my pansies and alyssum, anyhow. And I jumped off the porch and went back to the phlox to plan out my campaign.

By early May we were settled on the farm once more. My pansies and alyssum were up—at least I believed they were up, but I spent many minutes of each day kneeling by them and studying the physiognomy of their cotyledons. I led Jonathan out to them one Sunday morning, and he regarded them with indulgence if not with enthusiasm. As he stooped to throw out a bunch of pebbles in one of the new beds I stopped him. "Oh, don't! Those are my Mizpah stones."

"Your what!"

"Why, just some little stones to mark a place. Some of the nasturtiums are there. I didn't know whether they were going to do anything—they looked so like chips—and then, being sent free that way—but they are.

"How do you know? They aren't up."

"No, but they will be soon. I—why, I just thought I'd see what they were doing."

"So you dug them up?" he probed.

"Not them—just it—just one. That's why I marked the place. I didn't want to keep disturbing different ones. Now what are you laughing at? Wouldn't you have wanted to know? And you wouldn't want to dig up different ones all the time! I don't know much about gardening, but—"

"I'm not laughing," said Jonathan. "Of course I should have wanted to know. And it is certainly better not to dig up different ones. There! Have I put your Mizpah back right?"

A few days later Jonathan wheeled into the yard and over near where I was kneeling by the phlox. "I saw a lady-slipper bud almost out to-day," he said.

"Did you? Look at my sweet alyssum. It's grown an inch since yesterday," I said. "Don't you think I could plant my cosmos and asters now?"

"Thunder!" said Jonathan; "don't you care more about the pink lady-slipper than about your blooming little sweet alyssum?"

"Why, yes, of course. I love lady-slippers. You know I do," I protested; "only—you see—I can't explain exactly—but—it seems to make a difference when you plant a thing yourself. And, oh, Jonathan! Won't you please come here and tell me if these are young pansies or only plantain? I'm so afraid of pulling up the wrong thing. I do wish somebody would make a book with pictures of all the cotyledons of all the different plants. It's so confusing. Millie had an awful time telling marigold from ragweed last summer. She had to break off a tip of each leaf and taste it. Why do you just stand there looking like that? Please come and help."

But Jonathan did not move. He stood, leaning on his wheel, regarding me with open amusement, and possibly a shade of disapproval.

"Lord!" he finally remarked; "you've got it!"

"Got what?" I said, though I knew.

"The garden germ."

Yes. There was no denying it. I had it. I have it still, and there is very little chance of my shaking it off. It is a disease that grows with what it feeds on. Now and then, indeed, I make a feeble fight against its inroads: I will not have another flower-bed, I will not have any more annuals, I will have only things that live on from year to year and take care of themselves. But—

"Alas, alas, repentance oft before
I swore—but was I sober when I swore?
And then—and then—came spring—"

and the florist's catalogues! And is any one who has once given way to them proof against the seductions of those catalogues? Those asters! Those larkspurs! Those foxgloves and poppies and Canterbury bells! All that ravishing company, mine at the price of a few cents and a little grubbing. Mine! There is the secret of it. Out in the great and wonderful world beyond my garden, nature works her miracles constantly. She lays her riches at my feet; they are mine for the gathering. But to work these miracles myself,—to have my own little hoard that looks to me for tending, for very life,—that is a joy by itself. My little garden bed gives me something that all the luxuriance of woods and fields can never give—not better, not so good, perhaps, but different. Once having known the thrill of watching the first tiny shoot from a seed that I have planted myself, once having followed it to leaf and flower and seed again, I can never give it up.

My garden is not very big nor very beautiful. Perhaps the stretch of rocks and grass and weeds beside the house—an expanse which not even the wildest flight of the imagination could call a lawn—perhaps this might be more pleasing if the garden were not there, but it is there, and there it will stay. It means much grubbing. Just putting in seeds and then weeding is, I find, no mere affair of rhetoric. Moreover, I am introduced through my garden to an entirely new set of troubles: beetles and cutworms and moles and hens and a host of marauding creatures above ground and below, whose number and energy amaze me. And each summer seems to add to their variety and resourcefulness. Clearly, the pleasures of a garden are not commensurate with its pains. And yet—

But there is one kind of joy which it gives me at which even the Scoffer—to wit, Jonathan—does not scoff. It began with Aunt Deborah's phlox. Then came Christabel's larkspur. The next summer Mrs. Stone sent me over some of her hardy little fall asters—"artemishy," she called them. And Anne Stafford sent on some hollyhock seeds culled from Emerson's garden. And Great-Aunt Sarah was dividing her peony roots, and said I might take one. And Cousin Patty asked me if I wouldn't like some of her mother's old-fashioned pinks. And so it goes.

And so it will go, I hope, to the end of the long day. Each year my garden has in it more of my friends, and as I look at it I can adopt poor Ophelia's pretty speech in a new meaning, and say, "Larkspur—that's for remembrance; hollyhocks—that's for thoughts." Remembrance of all those dear other gardens which I have come to know, and in whose beauties I am coming to have a share; thoughts of all those dear other gardeners upon whom, as upon me, the miracle of the seed has laid a spell from which they can never escape.

VI

The Farm Sunday

I have never been able to discover why it is that things always happen Sunday morning. We mean to get to church. We speak of it almost every Sunday, unless there is a steady downpour that puts it quite out of the question. But, somehow, between nine and ten o'clock on a Sunday morning seems to be the farm's busiest time. If there are new broods of chickens, they appear then; if there is a young calf coming, it is his birthday; if the gray cat—an uninvited resident of the barn—must go forth on marauding expeditions, he chooses this day for his evil work, and the air is rent with shrieks of robins, or of cat-birds, or of phœbes, and there is a wrecked nest, and scattered young ones, half-fledged, that have to be gathered into a basket and hung up in the tree again by our united efforts. And always there is the same conversation:

"Well, what about church?"

"Church! It's half-past ten now."

"We can't do it. Too bad!"

"Now, if it hadn't been for that cat!"—or that hen—or that calf!

There are many Sunday morning stories that might be told, but one must be told.

It was a hot, still Sunday in July. The hens sought the shade early, and stood about with their beaks half open and a distant look in their eyes, as if they saw you but chose to look just beyond you. It always irritates me to see the hens do that. It makes me feel hotter. Such a day it was. But things on the farm seemed propitious, and we said at breakfast that we would go.

"I've just got to take that two-year-old Devon down to the lower pasture," said Jonathan, "and then I'll harness. We ought to start early, because it's too hot to drive Kit fast."

"Do you think you'd better take the cow down this morning?" I said, doubtfully. "Couldn't you wait until we come back?"

"No; that upper pasture is getting burned out, and she ought to get into some good grass this morning. I meant to take her down last night."

"Well, do hurry." I still felt dubious.

"Oh, it's only five minutes' walk down the road," said Jonathan easily. "I'm all ready for church, except for these shoes. I'll have the carriage at the door before you're dressed."

I said no more, but went upstairs, while Jonathan started for the barnyard. A few minutes later I heard from that direction the sounds of exhortation such as are usually employed towards "critters." They seemed to be coming nearer. I glanced out of a front window, and saw Jonathan and his cow coming up the road past the house.

"Where are you taking her?" I called. "I thought you meant to go the other way."

"So I did," he shouted, in some irritation. "But she swung up to the right as she went out of the gate, and I couldn't head her off in time. Oh, there's Bill Russell. Head her round, will you, Bill? There, now we're all right."

"I'll be back in ten minutes," he called up at my window as he repassed.

I watched them go back up the road. At the big farm gate the cow made a break for the barnyard again, but the two men managed to turn her. Just beyond, at the fork in the road, I saw Bill turn down towards the cider-mill, while Jonathan kept on with his convoy over the hill. I glanced at the clock. It was not yet nine. There was plenty of time, of course.