In a pretty salad-dish on a little side table, there was a lettuce salad that looked like a great green bloom, and lying upon another smaller dish at the side, were four of the roundest, reddest radishes imaginable, the very last of the little garden crop. But now something came in in two small covered dishes, something that steamed, and behold, when they were opened, in one were Davy's beans, ever so many, white and mottled, all cooked and hot and ready to be eaten, and in the other Davy's pease! But that was not all. Still another steaming dish came in, and when that was opened, everybody fairly shouted, "Oh, my!" for in that dish was Davy's corn! Think of it! Two whole ears of corn, one large one to be divided between little Prue and Davy.
Never was there such a birthday dinner as that. The flowers were beautiful, the beans and the pease splendid, while the corn, why the corn was just the sweetest and best corn that was ever raised. They all said so, and Davy got excited and said he was going to plant a thousand acres of corn just as soon as the Chief Gardener would let him.
And then they began to plan for the new garden of summer-time, which was to be made outside.
Most of their things they thought they would take out of the windows, and reset in the open garden, but, of course, there were no radishes or lettuce to take now, and the corn and pease were no longer of value, while the vines would be hard to move. So they decided to take out all but the vines. Prue could reset her pansies and nasturtiums and sunflower, and the sweet-pease, which would bloom all summer, perhaps, leaving the morning-glories and scarlet runner in the windows, to bloom as long as they would.
"My windows would look very bare without even the vines left of the little gardens," said big Prue, "but it is getting so green outside, that we won't miss them so much now, and, of course, everything must go, sometime."
"And we are going to have them next year," said Davy. "We will begin then earlier, and have other things, too, but first we are going to have ever and ever so much outside, in the real garden. Prue is going to have flowers, and I am going to have, oh, ever and ever so many good things to eat!"
And so with big Prue's birthday dinner, the little garden in the windows saw its greatest glory, and the month of April, which had been its happiest season, came to a happy end.
MAY