“Two we will keep for the sake of their flowers, but the others must go, and give room for the Figs.” So said the new Master, and so it was done. The unfruitful Almond trees were dug up and thrown over the wall,—all but the two whom their sisters had ransomed with their lives; for beauty has its price in this world and there must be some one to pay it.
When another spring came round, it was the little Fig tree that stood in the bright corner where the splendor of the road lamp shone upon its leaves all night. Its leaves were now as broad as a man’s outspread hand, and its fruit was twice the size it had been the season before.
Its sister trees stood round and interlaced their boughs about it.
“Lean on us, little one,” they said, regarding it with pride.
“But you have your own load to bear.”
“We scarcely feel it,” said the happy trees.
This was true; for the burden that had seemed beyond their strength, when their hearts were heavy with shame and despondency, they could bear up lightly now, since they had learned its meaning and its worth.
The new Master’s children were so full of the joy of spring in that mountain garden—for they too, like the little Fig trees, had been transplanted from arid ground—they had no words of their own in which to utter it. So their mother taught them some words from a song as old, almost, as the oldest garden that was ever planted:—
“For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land; the fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell.”