A garden is hardly complete without the restful shade of trees—the loveliness of interchanging sunshine and shadow.
Therefore was it good to find trees, many and thrifty, hobnobbing together in our new holding.
A big sturdy hornbeam, with song-birds nesting high among its branches, shaded the eastern lawn, while close beside the kitchen porch a graceful rose-acacia reared its slender trunk, and every May-time wove its garlands of rosy bloom.
All about us grew maple and ash trees. Tall pines to hold the song of the wind among their boughs. Spruces and Arbor Vitæs (these absolutely upon their last legs, but still persistent), and, fairest of them all, two glorious tulip-trees towering upward, like sturdy masts, towards the blue heaven, flinging to the winds their high leafy boughs, like pale green pennants, picked out (in blooming time) with shapely miracles of color.
Here and there an apple or a pear tree had strayed from orchard to lawn; and in the very midst of things a huge cherry tree rendered its yearly tale of juicy blackhearts—enough and to spare for neighbors and robins, and for our own preserve jars. On a bleak northern rise behind the house, an ancient juniper (like another "Cleopatra's needle") stood slenderly against the sky—as perfect a pyramid as if shaped by the gardener's shears, instead of the keen-edged winter wind.
CHAPTER II
"The Man with the Hoe"
As before our advent at the "Mansion House" the man-of-all-work—after a long administration of its out-door affairs in the soft service of an easily-gratified mistress (the dear "Lady of the Wheeled Chair") had been abstracted from the family circle, the first step in our gardening was to call in the local "Man with the Hoe." This useful personage (let it here be said) was not—like Mr. Markham's terrible hero—"Brother to the ox." His "jaw" and "forehead" were all right, and, owing to the use of a hoe with proper length of handle, "The Weight of the Centuries" had not disturbed the contour of his back. One could not swear that he knew his "Plato" (alas, how few of us do!) and as to "The Swing of the Pleiades," it was not his immediate concern.