August, 1913 



THE GARDEN MAGAZINE 



19 



watched them, week by week, grow in size 

 and importance as their audience increased; 

 we knew the Solomon's seal that leaned its 

 slender stem over the brook that its tiny 

 bells might look at themselves in the water; 

 the wild ginger that lived close to the water, 

 stooping its red-brown cup as if to drink 

 from the rushing little brook; we stepped 

 •carefully aside for a tiny white wood- violet 

 — a darling little sprite of a plant that 

 .grew directly in our path, settled comfort- 

 ably in the crook of a tree-root, set on a 

 cushion of bright green moss with a 

 baby hemlock no taller than itself for 

 company. 



And the color! Here might the cunning- 

 «st couturier come for hints. How was it 

 that the fungus on the fallen brown oaks 

 took such marvelous tones of orange, and 

 that on the beeches varied through every 

 shade of gray to rose and crimson? Past 

 the brook, the woods were level and open, 

 a fairy-book forest with wide aisles into 

 which the sun came faintly. There were 

 .great beeches and oaks, and one cleft and 

 hollow beech where Ariel might have been 

 pent — and been fairly comfortable. Under 

 foot the carpet of brown dead leaves was gay 

 with checkerberries and ground pine and in 

 it grew lovely wild things — fringed polygala 

 and foam flower, fragile star flowers, each 

 "borne on the slenderest of thread-like stems 

 above the circlet of pointed leaves. 



Evidently Madame Nature has the poor- 

 est opinion of her human children! Let 

 them establish themselves, and she hastens 

 to withdraw her darlings to safety, hurries 

 away the most delicate of her dainty wild 

 things, and throws back plantain and bur- 

 docks and witch grass, as destructive chil- 

 dren are given playthings that they can't 

 hurt; and at the same time, she scatters 

 her loveliness over bleak and unvisited 

 pastures for the cows to tread on and the 

 woodchucks to browse over, supremely 

 ■careless as to whether it's seen or no by 

 iuman folk. 



In the pasture she was royally spend- 

 thrift. She clad her old sleeping giant of a 

 hill, with a mantle wonderfully embroidered 

 in changing colors. Green was the ground- 

 work — the thin, light green of the pasture 

 sod, the bordering trees for fringes. Then 

 began the decoration; first, the faint show- 

 ing of anemones at the edges; then, through- 

 out the green showed the purple and gold 

 -of cinquefoil and blue violet; then bluets, 

 misting over the green with their exquisite 

 color, the faint young blue of the April sky. 

 When the bluets grew fewer and fainter, 

 she starred it over with wild strawberry 

 blossoms, like tiny white wild roses, and 

 swaying above them, as lightly poised as a 

 dragonfly over a pool, the columbine. 

 Then she changed the scheme for daisies 

 in white and gold and, under-foot, deep blue 

 heal all and the tiny bright red straw- 

 berries; so on through the summer and 

 autumn, change after change, with never a 

 pause and never a break, shifting imper- 

 -ceptibly from the dull rose of spirea to the 

 . gorgeous yellow of golden rod, as a skilled 



musician changes the key and keeps the 

 harmony. 



I never tired of watching things in the 

 pasture, of poking into the mounds of moss 

 for the fairy cups and the elf-needles. 

 Clarky used to bring a book with her, but 

 I'd as soon thought of bringing a book to 

 the opera. Usually we camped near the 

 woods, at the edge of the pasture where 

 were marvelous mounds of moss — not the 

 close green velvet that creeps over the 

 rocks, making gorgeous skull caps for the 

 old graybeards. This was deep and soft, 

 and in structure like a miraculously tiny 

 forest in which the checkerberries glowed 

 like huge crimson lanterns; here were all the 

 flowers of the pasture in very rare editions, 

 violets tall and slender and wonderful in 

 color; and bluets, not close-set as in the 

 open, but delicate and solitary, like the star- 

 flowers, and beside them tiny hemlocks and 

 beech-trees not any taller than a violet, 

 and hovering above, the columbines. I 

 could have watched it contentedly the 

 whole day. Clarky, when she tired of 

 reading, used to cut a thin sapling of black 

 birch and make, with her jack knife, odd 

 little bread-and-butter knives for our use. 



Then, when the sun grew low, we would 

 go home again to the childish supper at the 

 doorstep with the thrushes and the friendly 

 chipmunks for company. 



Chapter XV 



At the end of June, Aunt Cassandra's 

 anxiety took a more tangible form. 



"Our friend Richard," she wrote, 

 "spends the Sabbath at Tavistock, which is 

 I believe, but a short distance beyond you. 

 He has kindly offered to tarry a day at 

 Enderby and ascertain something of your 

 way of life and the character of your 

 occupations, which seem to me extra- 

 ordinary and unsuitable. " 



"What a nuisance!" said I, irreverently. 



Clarky looked up from her letters — 

 she had brought the mail up from the foot 

 of the hill and sat beside me on the doorstep 

 reading a letter of her own, the mail bag 

 at her feet. "Why? " she asked, "What's 

 wrong?" 



I read aloud from Aunt Cassandra — 



"Well," she repeated "What's wrong? 

 What's he like? T^ie pansies are a good 

 sort and good plant&| ''the books are intelli- 

 gent, neither drivel nor those near-fact 

 things, pre,tty to look at and no earthly use 

 if you want to plant. I've seefi' ; so many 

 fool things sent to invalids I should think 

 him rather intelligent. Isn't 'me? What 

 is he like?" 



"Thin, rather tall, smooth-shaven," 

 I said meditatively, "he wears spectacles — 

 the large, round lenses that they make in 

 Boston." 



"That's nothing against him," said 

 Clarky quickly. 



"Dark hair," I continued, "and one lock 

 always falls forward and hits the edge of 

 his spectacles — it makes you nervous. 

 He has a greenhouse and likes to potter in 

 it — and a garden. But he's a young 



clergyman, Clarky, and he used to send me 

 his sermons!" 



"Weren't they good sermons?" she 

 demanded. 



"Oh yes, well thought out — slightly 

 socialistic — but I didn't want problems. 

 And poetry, Clarky! He would send that 

 too!" 



"Good?" she inquired. 



' ' Wearying. The form was after Rossetti ; 

 sometimes there would be a roughness and 

 an apparent force that was Browningesque; 

 you'd think something was coming surely; 

 but the utterance, when it came, was — 

 Tupper! It worried one's mind. Always 

 I would think I was going to get something; 

 always I wouldn't. " 



"But the poetry has stopped?" asked 

 Clarky as if making a diagnosis. 



I nodded. 



"Sermons and a greenhouse and spec- 

 tacles and socialism — " she meditated. 



"Oh, and a violin. He really plays well 

 — very well." 



" ■ — And a violin, " she amended, 

 thoughtfully. There was a moment's 

 silence. 



"The Reverend Richard will like it up 

 here," she said at last. "He'll want to 

 stay." 



Although the day was Wednesday, and 

 it would be two days, Friday, at least, be- 

 fore Richard Protheroe descended on us, 

 or, to speak more literally, ascended to us — 

 Clarky went indoors presently and began 

 to prink the house. The same instinct, I 

 suppose, that makes a woman pat her hair 

 and look in the glass when a visitor is an- 

 nounced. She dusted, not that that was 

 an extraordinary occurrence, but rarely 

 necessary — there was more dust in one 

 morning in town than in three weeks on 

 our hill. She cut long sprays of the cinna- 

 mon roses and put them in the stone crock 

 on the window-sill. Then she began to 

 polish the andirons. 



This wasn't altogether vanity on behalf of 

 the house, for if Richard was to report us 

 to Aunt Cassandra, naturally we wanted 

 him to carry back grapes of Eschol, as it 

 were, rather than any report of giants in 

 the land. 



While Clarky was doing this, I sat on the 

 doorstep and looked at the flower-beds 

 than ran alongside the house. Then I, too, 

 rose up and followed her example; I began 

 to prink the garden. I got the hose and 

 washed the faces of the pansies and the 

 maiden-hair in Clarky's garden-bed, and a 

 lovely little bit of herb Robert that was 

 coming into bloom from a chink in the wall, 

 until they looked as fresh and cheerful as a 

 baby after a bath. Then I went around 

 the corner to see the larger garden. Rich- 

 ard was something of an expert in a shy, 

 quiet way, and I felt a little like a Sunday 

 School superintendent surveying his school, 

 just before the children are to give a pro- 

 gram. There were all the bright little faces 

 in nicely kept rows. To me, the garden 

 looked very creditable. 



(To be continued) 



