AN ISLAND GARDEN 19 



for me ; after that no hands touch it save my own 

 throughout the whole season. Day after day it 

 is so pleasant working in the bright cool spring 

 air, for as yet the New England spring is alert 

 and brisk in temperature and shows very little 

 softening in its moods. But by the seventh day 

 of the month, as I stand pruning the Rosebushes, 

 there is a flutter of glad wings, and lo ! the first 

 house martins ! Beautiful creatures, with their 

 white breasts and steel-blue wings, wheeling, 

 chattering, and scolding at me, for they think I 

 stand too near their little brown house on the 

 corner of the piazza eaves, and they let me know 

 their opinion by coming as near as they dare and 

 snapping their beaks at me with a low guttural 

 sound of displeasure. But after a few days, when 

 they have found they cannot scare me and that I 

 do not interfere with them, they conclude that I 

 am a harmless kind of creature and endure me 

 with tranquillity. Straightway they take posses- 

 sion of their summer quarters and begin to build 

 their cosy nest within. Oh, then the weeks of 

 joyful work, the love-making, the cooing, chatter- 

 ing, calling, in tones of the purest delight and 

 content, the tilting against the wind on burnished 

 wings, the wheeling, fluttering, coquetting, and 

 caressing, the while they bring feathers and straw 

 and shreds and down for their nest-weaving, 

 all this goes on till after the eggs are laid, when 

 they settle down into comparative quiet. Then 

 often the father bird sits and meditates happily 

 in the sun upon his tiny brown chimney- top, 

 while the mother bird broods below. Or they 



