8 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 



many successive committees of the Horticultural Society, 

 and he eats with a relishing gulp not inferior to Dr. 

 Johnson s. He feels and freely exercises his right of 

 eminent domain. His is the earliest mess of green peas 

 his all the mulberries I had fancied mine. But if he gets 

 also the lion s share of the raspberries, he is a great planter, 

 and sows those wild ones in the woods that solace the 

 pedestrian and give a momentary calm even to the jaded 

 victims of the White Hills. He keeps a strict eye over 

 one s fruit, and knows to a shade of purple when your 

 grapes have cooked long enough in the sun. During the 

 severe drought a few years ago, the robins wholly vanished 

 from my garden. I neither saw nor heard one for three 

 weeks. Meanwhile a small foreign grape-vine, rather shy 

 of bearing, seemed to find the dusty air congenial, and, 

 dreaming perhaps of its sweet Argos across the sea, 

 decked itself with a score or so of fair bunches. I watched 

 them from day to day till they should have secreted sugar 

 enough from the sunbeams, and at last made up my mind 

 that I would celebrate my vintage the next morning. But 

 the robins too had somehow kept note of them. They must 

 have sent out spies, as did the Jews into the promised land, 

 before I was stirring. When I went with my basket, at 

 least a dozen of these winged vintagers bustled out from 

 among the leaves, and alighting on the nearest trees 

 interchanged some shrill remarks about me of a derogatory 

 nature. They had fairly sacked the vine. Not Welling 

 ton s veterans made cleaner work of a Spanish town ; not 

 Federals or Confederates were ever more impartial in the 

 confiscation of neutral chickens. I was keeping my grapes 

 a secret to surprise the fair Fidele with, but the robins 

 made them a profounder secret to her than I had meant. 

 The tattered remnant of a single bunch was all my harvest- 

 home. How paltry it looked at the bottom of my basket, 

 as if a humming-bird had laid her egg in an eagle s nest ! 

 I could not help laughing ; and the robins seemed to join 

 heartily in the merriment. There was a native grape-vine 

 closo by, blue with its less refined abundance, but my 



