“I have come to see your flowers!”
The woman wiped her well-soaked hands on a limp apron, and replied in perfect Pennsylvania Dutch;
“I don’t understand you.” But she smiled a smile of extraordinary width.
They faced each other, Scotland and Germany, curiously for one moment. Then Barbara pointed dramatically at the pansies. There was that look on her face that was understood by frontiers-women of many tongues. The German began babbling sympathetically about her display, pointing out one beauty after another, breaking off little sprays to hold near her visitor’s longing nose. So much there was that Barbara wanted to ask, and her hostess wanted to explain, and they understood each other after so many repetitions and efforts! Barbara examined each plant, and felt the soil it grew in. She bowed her face down to them again and again, hungrily. Not one did she omit to sigh over enviously. Presently the German led her into the shanty, and set before her in a red-carpeted, closely-guarded parlor, coffee and coffee-cake, which Barbara esteemed but lightly, surprised out of politeness by the fact that on the kitchen table a pair of pigeons sat cooing. Then, the refreshments being finished, the woman took her by the hand, and led her out of the house, down a barren street, just as she was, in her wet dress, unhatted, red-faced. Barbara surmised she was being taken to a place where plants were sold.
They came to a large square house, built on a high foundation, in a yard planted with trees which were not just small sticks, approached by a walk which had wide blossoming borders which Barbara would fain have examined. But her guide waddled up determinedly and knocked on the door. A lady opened it, a lady perhaps fifty, whose gray calico was fastened at the throat most primly by an oval brooch. She was sad-faced, and gray-haired, and as the German woman babbled to her, she turned and smiled upon Barbara gravely and kindly, and asked them to come in. But the German was not for sitting in a house on such a morning. The lady put on a wide hat, and gloves, and came out to the border. In her foreign language, which was merely New England English, she discussed her loves, pointing out one blossom and another. Her pansies never equaled the German’s. But look at the number of buds on her peonies! She could hardly wait till they opened. And Mrs. McNair followed her about with the great question on her tongue, namely, where does one get these things in this country?
She was standing by a yellow rosebush when she asked that, first, and its owner, bending down, said;
“Here’s a good little new one now. You may have that. Have you a place for it? Where do you live?”
“Twenty-five miles west.”
The lady sighed.
“We have come for wood to build our house to-day,” Barbara informed her.