43 A HUNDEED YEARS 



the house, and their taste too ! North CaroUnas the 

 gardener called them. And now in the same garden, 

 but certainly not the same climate, no strawberry thinks 

 itself called upon to ripen until a month later. The same 

 temperature as seventy years ago ! What fools we must 

 be supposed to be by those rascals of astronomers ! 



" And we always had a few cherries to serve up on 

 the 4th of June also ! Was there ever such a mass of 

 cherries either before or since as in the Tigh Dige garden, 

 sheltered from every cold wind and held up to the sun 

 by all that could be desired in woods and mountains ? 

 And were there ever five boys and a tutor better able 

 to make an impression on the cherry-trees ? Our be- 

 loved tutor told me years afterwards of one thing that 

 was a weight on his mind — namely, that having dropped 

 one forenoon 999 cherry-stones from his mouth into 

 his fishing-bag, he was suddenly called away and pre- 

 vented finishing his thousand at one go. Our old 

 Nathaniel, John Eraser, our eastern gardener, having 

 two sons at Conon with the same turn for fruit as we 

 had, schemed to save the peaches and nectarines he 

 wanted for his employer. Every night before stopping 

 work he raked nicely all the soil borders ere he made 

 himself cosy at the fireside with his slippers on instead 

 of heavy wet shoes. Yet he was much surprised to miss 

 many a lovely peach he was sure he left on the tree the 

 previous evening. And lo and behold, there were the 

 thief's footmarks all over the raked border ! So he out 

 with the foot-rule and thought he would soon discover 

 the criminal. But the mystery deepened when he 

 found that the shoes which fitted the footmarks on the 



