The two men stood smiling and listening.
“Doctor, maybe I’d better get her some little gift before breakfast. What do you advise?”
“My son, that partridge is a corruption of ‘part of a mistletoe bough’, alias golden bough. So you’d better bring her some sort of golden bough. Agricola, flowers!”
The dog started up the hill, and Marvin followed. Resting on the ridge for a few minutes, he discovered a grave beneath the pines, nameless, but covered with little white blooms of mitchella, fragrant as any flower that blows.
He went on down to the doctor’s small paradise enclosed by woven wire to keep the deer out, and easily discovered the right flower, a kind of golden iris. Its petals had a thin luxuriance that suggested wither, as if gold had indeed been persuaded to grow like organic stuff.
He brought it home to her, and she called him Midas, and let him place his tribute on the breakfast table.
A little later she let him share the fun of baking buckwheat cakes.
“But,” said the doctor, “I didn’t know we had any buckwheat.”
“Oh, it’s a present from Mr. Gillies. He sent it up by the dog, and he sent back ten dollars that he owes you for potatoes.”
And Marvin grinned in the kitchen while he baked griddle cakes as big as a stove cover. Her own versions of beechnut wheat were about as large as the first ring that breaks from a beechnut falling into a pool, but she did not refuse to eat his.