CHAPTER IV
MOONLIGHT AND APPLE-BLOW
"I hope you feel easy in your mind, child, now you've put this whole garden to bed and tucked 'em under cover, heads and all," said Uncle Tucker, as he spread the last bit of old sacking down over the end of the row of little sprouting bean vines. "When I look at the garden I'm half skeered to go in the house to bed for fear I haven't got a quilt to my joints."
"Now, honey sweet, you know better than that," answered Rose Mary as she rose from weighting down the end of a frilled white petticoat with a huge clod of earth and stretched it so as to cover quite two yards of the green shoots. "I haven't taken a thing of yours but two shirts and one of your last summer seersucker
coats. I'm going to mend the split up the back in it for the wash Monday. Aunt Amandy lent me two aprons and a sack and a petticoat for the peony bushes, and Aunt Viney gave me this shawl and three chemises that cover all the pinks. I've taken all the tablecloths for the early peas, and Stonie's shirts, each one of them, have covered a whole lot of the poet's narcissus. All the rest of the things are my own clothes, and I've still got a clean dress for to-morrow. If I can just cover everything to-night, I won't be afraid of the frost any more. You don't want all the lovely little green things to die, do you, and not have any snaps or peas or peonies at all?"
"Oh, fly-away!" answered Uncle Tucker as he tucked in the last end of a nondescript frill over a group of tiny cabbage plants, "there's not even a smack of frost in the air! It's all in your mind."
"Well, a mind ought to be sensitive about covering up its friends from frost hurts," an
swered Rose Mary propitiatingly as she took a satisfied survey of the bedded garden, which looked like the scene of a disorganized washday. "Thank you, Uncle Tucker, for helping me—keep off the frost from my dreams, anyway. Don't you think—"
"Well, howdy, folks!" came a cheerfully interruptive hail from across the brick wall that separated the garden from the cinder walk that lay along Providence Road, which ran as the only street through Sweetbriar, and Caleb Rucker's long face presented itself framed in a wreath of budding rose briars that topped the wall in their spring growth. "Tenting up the garden sass ag'in, Miss Rose Mary?"