Gypsy returned to her seam, and the apple-blossoms, and to her own little meditations about the china-closet key; which, being of a private and somewhat humiliating nature, are not given to the public.
The apple-tree stood in one corner of a very pleasant garden. Mr. Breynton had a great fancy for working over his trees and flowers, and, if he had not been a publisher and bookseller, might have made a very successful landscape-gardener. Poor health had driven him out of the professions, and the tastes of a scholar drove him away from out-door life; he had compromised the matter by that book-store down opposite the post-office. The literature of a Vermont town is not of the most world-stirring nature, and it did occur to him, occasionally, that business was rather dull, but his wife loved the old home, the children were comfortable and happy, and he himself, he thought, was getting rather old to start out on any new venture elsewhere; so Yorkbury seemed likely to be the family nest for life.
It was the same methodical kind-heartedness that made him at once so thoughtful and tender a father, and yet so habitually worried by the children’s little failings, that gave him his taste for beautiful flowers and shrubbery, and his skill in cultivating them. This garden was his pet enterprise. It was gracefully laid out with winding walks, evergreens, fruit-trees and flower-beds; not in stiff patterns, but with a delightful studied negligence, such as that with which an artist would group the figures on a landscape. Rocks and vines and wild flowers were scattered over the garden very much as they would be found in the fields; stately roses and dahlias, delicate heliotrope and aristocratic fuchsias, would grow, side by side, with daisies and buttercups. But, best of all, Gypsy liked the corner where the golden russet stood. A bit of a brook ran across it, which had been caught in a frolic one day, as it went singing away to the meadows, and dammed up and paved down into a tiny pond.
The short-tufted grass swept over its edge like a fringe, and in their season slender hair-bells bent over, casting little blue shadows into the water; the apple-boughs, too, hung over it, and flung down their showers of pearls and rubies, when the wind was high. Moreover, there was a statue. This statue was Gypsy’s pride and delight. It was Aladdin’s Palace, the Tuilleries, Versailles, and the Alhambra, all in one. The only fault to be found with it was that it was not marble. It was a species of weather-proof composition, but very finely carved, and much valued by Mr. Breynton. It was a pretty thing—a water-nymph rising from an unfolded lily, with both hands parting her long hair from a wondering face, that, pleased with its own beauty, was bent to watch its reflection in the water.
Altogether, the spot was so bewitching, that it is little wonder Gypsy’s work kept dropping into her lap, and her eyes wandering away somewhere into dreamland.
One of those endless seams on a white skirt that you have torn from the placket to the hem, is not a very attractive sight, if you have it to mend, and don’t happen to like to sew any better than Gypsy did.
She seemed fated to be interrupted in her convulsive attempts at “run-and-back stitching.” Winnie was hardly in the house, before Sarah Rowe came out in the garden to hunt her up.
“Oh, dear,” said Gypsy, as Sarah’s face appeared under the apple-boughs; “I’m not a bit glad to see you.”
“That’s polite,” said Sarah, reddening; “I’ll go home again.”
“Look,” said Gypsy, laughing; “just see what I’ve got to mend, and I came out here on purpose to get it done, so I could come over to your house. You see I oughtn’t to be glad to see you at all, but I am exceedingly.”