The Idyl of Twin Fires

by Walter Prichard Eaton

“Hard Cider, after all, is an artist,” I thought. “He has the artistic conscience–and, being a Yankee, he won’t admit it.”

I went back to my orchard, working with a greater confidence and speed now, born of practice; and I had begun on the second row by five o’clock. Then I walked up to the plateau. Joe was working overtime, covering the drills, while his father was doing the stable work. I staked the three sections of the field containing Early Rose, Dibble’s Russet, and Irish Cobbler respectively, and entered in my notebook the date of planting. It occurred to me then and there to keep a diary of all seeds, soils, fertilizers, and plantings, noting weather conditions and pests during the growing season, and the time, quality, and quantity of harvest. That diary I began the same evening; I have kept it religiously ever since, and I have learned more about agriculture from its pages than from any other book–something I don’t say vainly at all, because it is but the careful tabulation of practical experience, and that is any man’s best teacher.

I picked up a hoe and helped Joe cover drills for half an hour. Thanks to golf and rowing, my hands were already calloused, or I don’t know what would have happened to them in those first days!

Then I walked back to my house. I could not bring myself to leave it. I walked down through the littered orchard to the brook, and planned out a cement dam and a pool. Then I walked back to the south side of the dwelling, and looked out over the slope where my main vegetable farm was to be. The land had been ploughed close up to the house. It would be easy to level it off for a hundred feet or more into a grass terrace, with a rose hedge at the end to shut out the farm, and a sundial in the centre. To the east it would go naturally into an extension of the orchard; to the west it would end at a grape arbour just beyond the farthest woodshed. I would place my garden hotbeds against the sheltered south side of the kitchen, and screen them with a bed of hollyhocks running west from the end of the main house, which extended in a jog some twelve or fifteen feet beyond the kitchen. Thus one end of my pergola veranda would naturally run off into a hollyhock walk, the other into the grassy slope of the orchard, while directly in front of the glass door would be the lawn, the sundial, and then a white bench against the rambler hedge. I saw it all as I stood there, saw it and thrilled to it as a painter must thrill to a new conception; thrilled, also, at the prospect of achieving it with my own hands; thrilled at the thought of dwelling with it all my days. I must have remained there a long time, lost in reverie, for I was very late to supper, and Mrs. Temple was not so cheerful as her wont.

That night I managed to keep awake till eleven, and got some work done. I also rose at a compromise hour of six in the morning, and worked another hour, almost catching up with what should have been my daily stint. But I realized that hereafter I could not work on the farm all day. I must give up my mornings to my manuscript reading.

“Well,” thought I, “I’ll do it–as soon as the orchard is finished.”

As soon as the orchard was finished! I stood amid the litter I had made on the ground, and reflected. I had completed the preliminary trimming of one row and part of a second. There were still over two rows and a half to do. And the worst trees were in those rows, at that. After they were trimmed, there was all the litter to clear out, and the stubs to be painted, and cement work to be done.

“Good gracious!” thought I, “if I do all that, when will I plant, when will I make my lawn?”

Were you ever lost in the woods, so that you suddenly felt a mad desire to rush blindly in every direction, helpless, bewildered, with a horrid sensation that your heart has gone down somewhere into your abdomen? That is the way I suddenly felt toward my farm. I couldn’t afford to employ more labour. Besides, I didn’t want to. I wanted to do the work myself. But there was so much to do!

I stood stock still and pulled myself together. “Rome was not built in a day,” I told myself. “You just take out the worst of the dead wood in those remaining trees now, and finish them another season, or else at odd times during the summer.”