FRIENDS IN FEATHERS 



bed. You could not see lettuce for larkspur, gaudy poppies 

 flamed above the onions, radishes were extracted without dis- 

 turbing the coreopsis. Buttercups, columbine, cinnamon pinks 

 and every dear old-fashioned flower homed in that garden; 

 possibly this explains why it was "mother's garden;" yet from it 

 came strawberries for a family of fourteen, exclusive of help and 

 guests; plenty of berries for jam and preserves, the same of every 

 other berry and fruit in it; all the vegetables we could use, and 

 many went to the neighbours, the minister and the pig pen; a 

 huge kraut barrel was filled each fall from cabbage that had 

 grown beneath castor beans and sunflowers; but always to us and 

 to the public it appeared a flower garden, while one of the com- 

 ponent parts of it were the flocks, literally flocks of Goldfinches 

 that came each mid-August and from then until snowfall feasted 

 on radish, lettuce and flower seeds. 



They gathered from the fence rows, woods pasture and forest 

 to come, a golden warbling company, rising and falling in short 

 waves and spurts of flight, singing on wing until the bright sum- 

 mer air was heavy with light, fragrance and melody; I filled my 

 soul with enough of it to last a lifetime and send around the 

 world from just "mother's garden." I am one dividend from 

 that garden on which my mother did not reckon; she aspired 

 to present a picture to the passerby and to her family, also to 

 fill her conserve closet shelves; she never dreamed that she was 

 writing future books, by proxy. So I sat among those flowers 

 by the day, looking, listening, thinking very big thoughts for so 

 small a person; to-day no part of the picture is more loved and 

 bright in memory than the sweep of the singing throng rising 

 over the high picket fence, then dropping on the swaying lettuce 

 and radish seed stalks. Often they almost alighted on me; once 

 one flew in our open front door and for a few palpitant seconds 

 I held its little trembling body in my eager grasp. I was so loth 



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