The ancients had it that every child was born under the influence of a particular star; a more spiritual age, that each child has its guardian angel. I have always believed that my particular guardian is a tree, and that one an apple, for this was the first tree that I remember lying under and looking up through the flower-laden branches at the sky, as mother sat upon the round seat that encircled the big trunk, the great fragrant Russian violets growing at her feet.
The first two birds I learned to call by name lived in that apple tree,—a robin who had saddled his untidy nest of mud and straws on a drooping branch, and a pair of purling bluebirds, who lived in a little hole where a broken limb had let in the rain and consequently decay followed,—while my first remembrance of being hurt was when a heavy Baldwin apple fell from the tip-top of the tree and bumped me on the forehead. As I grew up and left dolls behind, my kinship with the tree grew more material,—four apples and a book, to be taken at regular intervals in the depths of the big leather chair in father’s study, being my formula for comfort on a rainy Autumn afternoon.
When we had looked and dreamed our fill, we turned into one of the meandering cross-roads that traverse Lonetown converging toward Pine Ridge, to crawl slowly upward to our watch-tower. This is the place of all others in our haunts for looking down upon the country as if mirrored in a pool or seen as mirage—Tuck Hill in May time, and there is nothing more to be desired! Evan and I crouched on the summit in the shelter of an old tree, still brave with blossoms though the trunk had fallen forward as if on its knees, and gazed our fill.
For days after, I felt the rush of the wind through my hair, for at this spot the wind of the hills meets the breath of the salt-water. Below, two rivers, that give the hill its name, shot their silvery arrows through the overhanging foliage; Tuck being an Indian term for river, as Moosatuck, Aspetuck.
No Druids crowned with oak leaves, or men of myth and marvel, came to us there, such as Puck could conjure from his charmed British hill home; only pictures of the simple settlers who planted their dwellings in the wilderness near ways that are remote even now from the pulse of things. These humble settlers dared and suffered and won out in spirit unconquerable; and though people and homes have vanished without written history, yet God in Nature has made record of them. Far and near throughout the land the festival of Apple Blossoms is celebrating them in the orchards, some still vigorous in age, and others all of gnarled trees that are leaning slowly earthward, as though making ready to fall to final sleep. Again others, young limbed and smooth of bark, unlicensed gypsy scions of the old race, often bitter of fruit, and yet sometimes chancing to bring forth a blend incomparable. These striplings, that wandered from the parent close, had ventured in stony pastures, sought shelter in wood edges, and followed the watercourses, and one and all seemed to whisper to the winds that bore their vital pollen, “Yes, they are all gone who planted us, but we try to shift for ourselves and live forever, for we cannot forget our mother, the Tree that stood in the midst of the First Garden!”
All these things I said half aloud, ending with the query, “Why has no one hereabout planted an orchard for thirty years at least?”
“You are forgetting that we are playing make believe,” muttered Evan, who had been lying so still that I thought he must be trying to ‘hear the grass grow,’ which is the outdoor man’s cover for sleep.
“If we are children, we mustn’t preach or think about why the orchards are running out or why no one plants apple trees,” he continued. “Children never look behind or before, but make a whole lifetime of a single happy day, and it’s because people nowadays are like restless children that they do not plant orchards; what do they care for the future; it seems too long before the fruiting time; they want a quicker crop.”
“Who is talking a sermon?” I cried. “Come down through that lane where we tied the horses; it’s full of dogwood and pinxter flowers; we will fill the chaise and bury ourselves in them; being children, it does not matter if they fade by noon so that we can gather more,” and then we wandered down and on, choosing the pleasantest ways, and letting the horses lead so long as we kept due north, or fancied we did.