The Little Fig-tree Stories

by Mary Hallock Foote

It was a blissful pastime, to swarm up the roof and lie, with one’s chin over the ridge-pole, gazing down from that thrilling height upon the familiar objects in the peaceful barnyard. Then to turn round carefully and get into position for the glorious, downward rush over the gray, slippery shingles! It could not have been any better for the shingles than for the shoes and stockings; but no one interfered. Perhaps grandfather remembered a time when he, too, used to slide on roofs, and scour the soles of his shoes and polish the knees of his stockings.

The upper gate had another, more lasting attraction; it opened into the lane that went up past the barn into the orchards—the lovely, side-hill orchards. Grandfather’s farm was a side-hill farm altogether, facing the river, with its back to the sunset. If you sat down comfortably, adjusting yourself to the slope of the ground, the afternoon shadows stretched far before you; you saw the low blue mountains across the river, and the sails of sloops tacking against the breeze. One orchard led to another, through gaps in the stone fences, and the shadow of one tree met the shadow of its neighbor, across those long, sun-pierced aisles. The trees bent this way and that, and shifted their limbs under the autumn’s burden of fruit. The children never thought of eating a whole apple, but bit one and threw it away for another that looked more tempting, and so on till their palates were torpid with tasting. Then they were swung up on top of the cold slippery loads and jolted down the lane to that big upper door that opened into the loft where the apple bins were. Here the wagon stopped with a heavy creak. Some one picked up a child and swung it in at the big door; some one else caught it and placed it safely on its feet at one side; and then the men began a race,—the one in the wagon bent upon filling a basket with apples and hoisting it in at the door, faster than the man inside could carry it to the bin and empty it and return for the next.

These bins held the cider apples. The apples for market were brought down in barrels from the orchards, and then the wagon load of apples and children went through still another gate that led to another short lane under more apple-trees, to the fruit-house, where, in the cool, dim cellar that smelled of all deliciousness, the fruit was sorted and boxed or barreled for market. And in the late afternoon, or after supper, if the children were old enough to stay up so late, they were allowed to ride on the loads of fruit to the steamboat landing.

It is needless to say that this gate, which led to the fruit cellar, was one Jack very early learned to open. In fact, it was so in the habit of being opened that it had never acquired the trick of obstinacy, and gave way at the least pull.

When Jack was rather bigger, he was allowed to cross the road with his cousin, a boy of his own age, and open the gate into Uncle Townsend’s meadow. This piece of land had been many years in his grandfather’s possession but it was still called by the name of its earlier owner. Names have such a persistent habit of sticking in those long-settled communities where there is always some one who remembers when staid old horses were colts and gray-haired men were boys, and when the land your father was born on was part of his grandfather’s farm on the ridge.

A brook, which was also the waste-way from the mill, ran across Uncle Townsend’s meadow. Sometimes it overflowed into the grass and made wet places, and in these spots the grass was of a darker color, and certain wild flowers were finer than anywhere else; also weeds, among others the purple, rank “skunk’s cabbage,” which the children admired, without wishing to gather.

Water-cresses clung to the brookside; in the damp places the largest, whitest bloodroot grew; under the brush along the fences and by the rocks grew the blue-eyed hepatica, coral-red columbine, and anemones, both pure white and those rare beauties with a pale pink flush. Dog-tooth violets, wild geraniums, Solomon’s seal, Jack-in-the-pulpit, came in due season, and ferns of every pattern of leaf and scroll. Later, when the wet places were dry, came the tall fire-lilies and brown-eyed Rudbeckias, “ox-eyed daisies” the children called them, together with all the delicate, flowering grass-heads and stately bulrushes and patches of pink and white clover,—and all over the meadow there was a sleepy sound of bees, and shadows with soft edges lost in deep waves of grass.

Of course the brook did not stop at the meadow. It went on gurgling over the stones, dark under the willows; but there were no more gates. The brook left the home fields and took its own way across everybody’s land to the river. That was a long walk, which Jack took only when he was much older.

Another journey, which he grew up to by degrees, was that one to the upper barn. How many times over did he repeat his instructions before he was allowed to set out: “Go up the hill, past the mill, until you come to the first turn to the left. Turn up that way and follow the lane straight on”—but this was a figure of speech, for no one could go straight on who followed that lane—“till you come to the three gates. Be sure to take the left-hand one of the three. Then you are all right. That gate opens into the lane that goes past the upper barn.”

Near the upper barn were three sugar-maples—the only ones on the place that yielded sap; and in one of the neighboring fields there was a very great walnut-tree, second in size only to the old chestnut-tree in the burying-ground which was a hundred and fifty years old and bigger round the body than three children clasping hands could span.