The Little Fig-tree Stories

by Mary Hallock Foote

“I thought the best way was—you know—to do it in secret,” said the child.

“That’s what we are taught; and some persons do good in that way, and cover it up as if they were ashamed of it. And so the Fig tree doesn’t tell anybody when it is going to bear fruit.”

The Fig trees had heard their doom. To the words that followed they had not listened; nor would they have understood much more of it than the child of its father’s meaning.

“What is this he calls our fruit?” they asked each other in fear and loathing. “Was that our fruit,—those green and purple swellings, that unspeakable weight of ugliness? Will it come year after year, and shall we never have a flower? The burden without the honor, without the love and praise, that beauty brings. That is the beginning and the end with us. Little sister, thou art happier than we, for soon thy burden-bearing will be done. Uncover thy head and let the sunbeams slay thee, for why should such as we encumber the ground!”

Trees that grow in gardens may have long memories and nature teaches them a few things by degrees, but they can know little of what goes on in the dwellings or the brains of men, or why one man should plant and call it good and later another come and dig up the first man’s planting. But so it happened in this garden. “The stone which the builders rejected, the same was made the head of the corner.”

“These little Fig trees with their strange, great leaves,—why were they put off here by themselves, I wonder?” A lady spoke who had lately come to the cottage. She was the wife of the new Master of the Garden. “I wish we had them where we could see them from the house,” she said. “All the other trees are commonplace beside them.”

“They are not doing well here,” said her husband. “This one, you see, is nearly dead. They must be transplanted, or we shall lose them all.”

Then followed talk which set the Fig trees a-tremble with doubt and amazement and joy. They were to be moved from that arid spot,—where, they knew not, but to some place of high distinction! They—the little aliens who had stood nearest the wall and thirsted for a bare existence—were to be called to the front of the garden and have honor in the presence of all! The despised burden which they had called their deformity they heard spoken of as the rarest fruit of the garden, and themselves outvalued beyond all the other trees, for that, having so little, they had done so much.

Beauty too was theirs, it appeared, as well as excellence, though they could scarcely believe what their own ears told them; and they had a history and a family as old as those of the Almond tree, who can remember nothing that did not happen a thousand years ago and so has never learned anything in the present.

But the Fig trees would have been deeply troubled at their promotion could they have known what it was to cost their neighbors the Almond trees.