"I don't like it," he would say sometimes to his wife; "I don't like it, Sarah. This doling out a peck of potatoes and two quarts of apples—why, Sarah, just think of the bushels and barrels I 've grown myself! It's so small, Sarah, so small!"
"Of course it is now," comforted Sarah, "but only think what 't will be later on—only think."
December, January, February, and March passed; and the first of April brought a letter from the lessee of the farm asking if he was to have the place through the summer.
"Of course he can have it," declared Sarah. "Just as if we wanted it again!"
"Yes, yes, of course," murmured Caleb. "I—I'll write later on. He said if he heard by the middle of the month, 't would do."
It was an early, and a wonderfully beautiful spring that year. Warm, moist winds came up from the south and stirred the twigs and branches into life. The grass grew green on sunny slopes, and the tulips and crocuses turned the dull brown beds into riotous color and bloom. Caleb went out of his way each day that he might pass a tiny little park, and he always stopped there a motionless two minutes—he would have told you that he was listening to the green things growing. Sarah grew restless indoors. She even crawled out on to the fire escape and sat there one day; but she never tried that but once.
Downstairs, on each side of the big front door was a square-yard patch of puny, straggling grass; and it was these two bits of possibilities that put a happy thought into Sarah's head. For three days she said nothing, but she fell into the way of going often in and out of that door, and always her eyes were hungrily fixed on one or the other of those squares. On the fourth day she bought a trowel and some flower seeds and set resolutely to work. She had dug the trowel into the earth four times, and was delightedly sniffing the odor from the moist earth when the janitor appeared.
"Did ye lose something, ma'am?" he asked suspiciously.
"Lose something?" laughed the woman. "Of course not! I've found something, William. I 've found a flower bed. I 'm going to have the prettiest one ever was."
"Oh, come now," began the man, plainly disturbed, "that ain't going to do, you know. I'll have to—"