The broad burdock leaves grew so rapidly in these days that their unstable stalks could not sustain them, and they trailed near the ground, bleached and unhealthy-looking, defacing the plant they should have adorned, like purposes unfulfilled for lack of will.
The wood violets spent all their surplus sap in leaves, and their later blooms were smothered in this luxuriance of foliage, as good resolves die 'mid many words.
In the maples, besides the singing of birds, there was now to be heard the "lisp of leaves" murmuring nature's alphabet. The swallows did not fly about so wildly, nor the bob-o-link, singing, soar so high—for the swallows hovered ever near the gray eaves of the barns, where, in their clay houses, the white eggs were being patiently warmed to life, and the bob-o-link (that slyest of birds) lingered ever in the grass meadows, where, upon a nest hid most cunningly, its mate sat listening to its singing. The ponds and the margins of the lake were alive with wriggling tadpoles, and Bing White hung enchanted over a pool left at the foot of his father's field where, when the sun was high, the water spiders darted hither and thither. It was not the insects Bing watched, but the shadows cast by them upon the sandy bottom of the pool; for, by a conspiracy between the water and the sun, the minute disks that form the feet of these creatures, and enable them to "walk upon the water" in very truth, were magnified a thousand times, and this enlarged refraction, like spots of gold, wavered through the water in consonance with the spiders' movements on the surface. When the sun shone brightly, the spiders came out in force, and darted about untiringly; it was as though the spiders wove a web of shining water, flinging round golden bobbins through the woof and weft of their fabric.
A little fawn-colored wild duck, belated in its journey to the north, came to this pool, a solitary but contented little bird, until Bing stoned it so persistently that it flew away one day, never to return. The spring grains were growing strongly, and the fall wheat was tall and vividly green, except that patches, bare save for knotty roots upthrown upon the surface, showed where, upon the high ground, it had been "winter killed," or spaces of bleached and yellowed blades indicated where, in the hollows, the heavy rains had "drowned it out." The blossoming of the fruit trees was past, that marvellous season of efflorescence and beauty, when the air is heavy with perfume and the paths strewn with petals—the rose and white of the apples, the mother-o'-pearl purity of the cherry, the fragrant ivory of the pears, loose-leaved plum flowers, and the hiding, faint-pink quince blooms—these and the peach blows that made gay and glad the gardens and the orchards.
And the woodlands and the lanes rejoiced also—for theirs were the cloyingly sweet blooms of the pea tree and the insignificant-looking but honey-smelling flowers of the locust, the bitter-sweet blossoms of the wild plum, so finely cut in tiny petals, so filled with snow-white stamens, so thickly massed together as to make the tree seem a fragrant snow cloud; then there was the red and pink of the "natural" apples, the ungrafted trees that had sprung up in every neighboring woodland; their taste was insipid, and had a peculiar, smoky flavor, but their blossoms were not less sweet than those of their cultured kinsfolk, and side by side with them stood the "choke cherry" with its long sprays of fragile blossoms that nauseate with their odor. Best of all, either in woodland or garden, orchard or lane, there was the wild crab-apple, upon whose gnarled and thorny branches grew its unspeakably sweet flower. The pink-veined petals folded about its perfumed centre, or opening but an hour or two, to disclose its golden heart, then, paling and falling, overcome by its own breath; for in the perfume of the wild crab-apple there lies all the story of the year, all the life of love; it has taken to itself all the sweetness, the bitterness, the languors, the fever, the desire, the satiety, the distaste, the joy, the sting of winter, the swoon of summer, the expectancy of spring, the overcoming of autumn, taken all, and mingling it with that we dream of, but know not, offers it to us upon thorny branches. And the fruit of these blossoms is bitter.
When the bloom was gone from all the trees, then the bees began to hum about the currant bushes, sipping the sweets of their green flowers, and there rose from orchard and field the savor of grape bloom. For Jamestown sent many hundred tons of grapes to the wine factories every year, and around the fences or over the cedars, there grew the "fox" grape, the "chicken" grape, and the bitter wild grape from which they distill a syrup for the throat.
Mrs. Deans' garden was "made," planted from side to side with vegetables, daily growing higher; the leaves were thickening on the currant bushes, and the young grape leaves were losing their downy whiteness and growing green and thick. Young turkeys, goslings, ducks, and baby chickens disputed with each other for the food dispensed so liberally to them; but Mrs. Deans ruled her poultry-yard, as she did her other belongings, with a rod of iron. The turkeys were the aristocrats of the place; they ate milk, white curds and chopped lettuce, and boiled eggs minced fine, with pepper; the rest fared on common meal—only all the spare time the bound girl had was spent in digging worms for the ducks.
"See that big worm there, Myron," she said one day, pointing to a huge, wriggling worm that two ducks were disputing possession of; "see that worm? Well, that's Mrs. Deans; of all the trouble that contrary critter give me I can't tell! It near wore me out, a-digging and a-digging; now it's in trouble its own self—you see—it'll be torn in two yet, yes—glad of it—there it goes! That'll happen to Mrs. Deans some day, when the Lord gets hold of her. Hush? I won't hush! Ain't she always a jangling? Jangling is something I can't abide, and how she goes it about nothing at all! She'll be tore in two along o' her ways, see if she ain't." With which satisfactory and encouraging prophecy Liz betook herself indoors.
Mrs. Deans had never found the time to go to Mrs. White's, but when one day her son Gamaliel told her he had seen Homer Wilson and Myron talking together in the "open village street" the heart of Mrs. Deans burned within her, and she reproached herself that she had not gone sooner; if she waited any longer it might be stale news; if they were brazen enough to talk to each other on the street—people—Jamestown people—would not fail to notice it; now that there was a possibility of other lips telling "young Ann White" of Homer Wilson's badness Mrs. Deans felt it incumbent upon her to act at once, to arise in her strength and baffle the designs of the evil one upon the unsuspecting citadel of young Ann White's heart. Mrs. Deans called it, to herself, "putting Homer Wilson's nose out of joint in that quarter anyhow," but the phrase matters little, the intention expressed being identical.
To "stir up the lazy and strengthen the weak" is a proceeding much to be admired doubtless, being enjoined by no less authoritative edict than the Westminster Confession; and however Mrs. Deans regarded the latter half of the injunction, she had nothing to reproach herself with in view of one of its requirements. That Mrs. Deans regarded all people under her as being lazy, as well as the majority of her neighbors, may be taken as granted; it will therefore be seen that she had little time for the latter half of the command. Before she left for Mrs. White's that day, she went to the kitchen and gave Liz and Myron an eloquent extempore narration of their past sins and shortcomings, their present delinquencies, their future state of sin and misery, proceeding to a peroration regarding the probabilities of their immortal lives, and rounding off her address with a pleasant prediction of eternal perdition for both of them. Having given them tasks they could not possibly perform before her return, Mrs. Deans turned her attention to her husband. As he could not move about much, and as he had a maddening gift for holding his tongue, Mrs. Deans was often exasperated by him; upon this occasion, having absolutely no handle to hinge her remarks upon, she contented herself with a few well-considered and audible reflections upon his utter uselessness, "either to God or man" as she put it, which threw such a burden upon her "helpless" shoulders; then she picked up his plug of chewing tobacco and narrowly regarded how much of it was gone, with a view to gauging the quantity he consumed in her absence. He squirmed under this; it affected him more than bitter words.