The Little Fig-tree Stories

by Mary Hallock Foote

They passed the word on softly, even to the littlest Fig-tree sister that stood in rocky ground close to the wall that shut the garden in from the pine wood at its back. The Pines were always chanting and singing anthems in the wood; but though the sound was beautiful, it oppressed the little Fig tree, and filled her with melancholy. Moreover, it was very dry in the ground where she stood, and a Fig tree must have drink.

“Sisters, I am very thirsty!” she cried. “Have you a little, a very little water that you could spare?”

The sister Fig trees had not much of anything to spare; they were spreading and growing fast, and their own soil was coarse and stony. The water that had so delicious a sound in coming seemed to leak away before their eager rootlets had more than tasted it; still they would have shared what they had, could they have passed it to their weaker sister. But the water would not go uphill; it ran away down, instead, and the Peach and Plum and Pear trees grew fat with what the Fig trees lacked.

“Courage, little sister!” they called to the fainting young tree by the wall. “The morning sun is strong, but soon the shadow of the wood will reach us. Cover thy face and keep a good heart. When our turn shall come, it will be thy turn too; one of us will not bloom without the others.”

It was only February, and the Almond trees stood alone, without a rival in their beauty. They stood in the proudest place in the garden, in full view both from the road and from a high gallery that ran across the front of the house where the Master of the Garden lived. The house faced the west, and whenever the people came out to look at the sunset they admired the beauty of the Almond trees, with their upright shoots, tipped and starred with luminous blossoms, against the deep, rich colors in the west; and when the west faded, as it did every evening, a lamp on a high post by the gate, bigger and brighter than the brightest star, was set burning,—“for what purpose,” thought the Almond trees, “but to show our beauty in the night?” So they watched through the dark hours, and felt the intoxication of the keen light upon them, and marveled at their own shadows on the grass.

They were somewhat troubled because so many of their blossoms were being picked; but the tree that stood nearest the house windows rose on tiptoe, and behold! each gathered spray had been kept for especial honor. Some were grouped in vases in the room, or massed against the chimney-piece; others were set in a silver bowl in the centre of a white table, under a shaded lamp, where a circle of people gazed at them, and every one praised their delicate, sumptuous beauty.

But peepers as well as listeners sometimes learn unpleasant truths about themselves.

“Aren’t we picking too many of these blossoms?” asked the lady of the house. “I’m afraid we are wasting our almond crop.”

“Almond trees will never bear in this climate,” said the Master of the Garden. “Better make the most of the blossoms while they last. The frost will catch them in a week or two.”

So the mother and children gathered the blossoms recklessly,—to save them, they said. Then a snow fall came, and those that had been left on the trees were whiter than ever for one day, and the next day they were dead. Each had died with a black spot at its core, which means the death that has no resurrection in the fruit to come.