After the snow came rain and frost, and snow again. The white Sierra descended and shook its storm cloak in the face of laughing Spring, and she fled away downward into the warm valleys. Alas, the flatterer! But the Almond trees alone had trusted her, and again their hope of fruit was lost.
“Did we not say so?” muttered the Apple tree between her chattering teeth. She was the most crabbed and censorious of the sisters, and by her talk of fruit one might have supposed her own to be of the finest quality; but this was not the case, and the gardener only that year had been threatening, though she did not know it, to cut off her top and graft her with a sweeter kind.
The leaves of the Almond tree are not beautiful, neither is her shape a thing to boast of. When spring did at last come back to stay, the Almonds were the plainest of all the trees. Their blossoms were like bright candles burned to the socket, that would light no more; their “corruptible crown” of beauty had passed to other heads. No one looked at them, no one pitied them, except the Fig trees, who wondered which had most cause to mourn,—they, who had never had a blossom, or the Almond trees, who had risked theirs and lost them all before the time of blossoms came.
The Fig trees’ reproach had not been taken away. While every tree around them was dressed in the pride of the crop to come, they stood flowerless and leafless, and burned with shame through all their barren shoots.
When the Master of the Garden came with his children to look at them, they hung their heads and were afraid.
“When will they blossom, like the other trees,” the children asked, “and what sort of flower will they bear?”
The Fig trees held their breath to hear the answer.
“A Fig tree has no flower, like the other fruit trees,” said the Master of the Garden. “Its blossom is contained in the fruit. You cannot see it unless you cut open the budding figs, and then you would not know it was a flower.”
“What is the use of having blossoms, if no one ever sees them?” one of the children asked.
“What is the use of doing good, unless we tell everybody and brag about it beforehand?” the father questioned, smiling.