Mrs. Greenleaf harnessed up the old white mare herself, and drove over to the offender’s house. No one knows how she dealt with him, but the buckwheat was cut before night. Harvey chuckles, and says she swung the scythe herself. Not much harm was done, and only a little of the yield turned out to have been injured by the buckwheat.
There are no rules about the planting of buckwheat near bee-hives. It is a matter of good feeling and neighborliness, and buckwheat is seldom grown where a neighbor keeps bees for profit; but it is impossible to guard against the trouble entirely and I have known a whole season’s yield to be discolored with honey brought from buckwheat, nine miles from the hives.
One early morning this June, as we were at breakfast on the piazza, a boy came round the corner of the house, and asked if we wanted “a quart of wild strawberries, a pint of cream, and a dozen of Mother’s fresh rolls, for forty cents!” We certainly did; and in the driveway we saw “Mother” waiting in the wagon, an alert-looking woman with a friendly face. She told us that she was Harvey Greenleaf’s daughter-in-law, and the boy her eldest son.
“I think there’s lots of small extra business that folks can do on the farms, if they’re spry, that sets things ahead a lot,” she said, à propos of the strawberries.
The rolls were as light as feather, and the cream very thick. We arranged for the same bargain twice a week while the berry season lasted!
In the autumn the same couple came again, this time with vegetables and fruit, nicely arranged, and with small cakes of fresh cream cheese done up in waxed paper in neat packages, each package stamped with S. Greenleaf, Eagle Cliff Farm. This is a new venture in our part of the country.
A mile of beautiful pasture, on a big scale, as smooth as an English down, slopes down from the back of the Greenleafs’ farm, rises in a noble ridge, and slopes again to where the Acushticook sparkles and dances over some thirty yards of rapids. The turf is close cropped and there are boulders and groups of half-sized firs and spruces scattered over the slope. There is a little wood in the upper corner, cool and shadowy, with a brooklet set deep in mosses, trickling through the midst. The pasture road leads through the firs and hemlocks, growing closer and more feathery, then through this wood, where Lady’s Slippers grow.