“Mon dieu! That New York—it is one beeg hell! Never do I feel so hot as in dat terrible city! I feel de grease it run all out of me! Mebbe, eef I stay at dat New York, I may be one beeg meelionaire—oui! But, non! Me? I prefer my leetle home, so cool and quiet in Hochelaga than be meelionaire in dat New York, dat is like purgatory.”
We had an old straggly garden. Everything about it looked “seedy” and uncared for and wild, for we could not afford a gardener. My sisters and I found small consolation in papa’s stout assertion that it looked picturesque, with its gnarled old apple trees and shrubs in their natural wild state. I was sensitive about that garden. It was awfully poor-looking in comparison with our neighbors’ nicely kept places. It was just like our family, I sometimes treacherously thought—unkempt and wild and “heathenish.” A neighbor once called us that. I stuck out my tongue at her when she said it. Being just next to the fine garden of Monsieur Prefontaine, it appeared the more ragged and beggarly, that garden of ours.
Mama would send us children to pick the maggots off the currant bushes and the bugs off the potato plants and, to encourage us, she would give us one cent for every pint of bugs or maggots we showed her. I hated the bugs and maggots, but it was fascinating to dig up the potatoes. To see the vegetables actually under the earth seemed almost like a miracle, and I would pretend the gnomes and fairies put them there, and hid inside the potatoes. I once told this to my little brothers and sisters, and Nora, who was just a little tot, wouldn’t eat a potato again for weeks, for fear she might bite on a fairy. Most of all, I loved to pick strawberries, and it was a matter of real grief and humiliation to me that our own strawberries were so dried-up looking and small, as compared with the big, luscious berries I knew were in the garden of Monsieur Prefontaine.
On that day, I had been picking strawberries for some time, and the sun was hot and my basket only half full. I kept thinking of the berries in the garden adjoining, and the more I thought of them, the more I wished I had some of them.
It was very quiet in our garden. Not a sound was anywhere, except the breezes, making all kinds of mysterious whispers among the leaves. For some time, my eye had become fixed, fascinated, upon a loose board, with a hole in it near the ground. I looked and looked at that hole, and I thought to myself: “It is just about big enough for me to crawl through.” Hardly had that thought occurred to me, when down on hands and knees I dropped, and into the garden of the great Monsieur Prefontaine I crawled.
The strawberry beds were right by the fence. Greedily I fell upon them. Oh, the exquisite joy of eating forbidden fruit! The fearful thrills that even as I ate ran up and down my spine, as I glanced about me on all sides. There was even a wicked feeling of fierce joy in acknowledging to myself that I was a thief.
“Thou shalt not steal!” I repeated the commandment that I had broken even while my mouth was full, and then, all of a sudden, I heard a voice, one that had inspired me always with feelings of respect and awe and fear.
“How you get in here?”
Monsieur Prefontaine was towering sternly above me. He was a big man, bearded, and with a face of preternatural importance and sternness.
I got up. My legs were shaky, and the world was whirling about me. I thought of the jail, where thieves were taken, and a great terror seized me. Monsieur Prefontaine had been the Mayor of Hochelaga. He could have me put in prison for all the rest of my life. We would all be disgraced.