“So did we!” we told him merrily, and separated, laughing. It had, it seemed, been a great day, in spite of Mary Elizabeth.
I went into the house, and hovered about the supper table. I perceived that I had missed hot waffles and honey, and these now held no charm. Grandmother Beers was talking.
“When I was eight years old,” she said, “I planted it by the well. And when Thomas went back to England fifty years after, he couldn’t reach both arms round the trunk. And there was a seat there—for travellers.”
I looked at her, and thought of that giant tree. Would those dead-looking little sticks, then, grow like that?
“If fifty thousand school children each planted a tree to-day,” said my mother, “that would be a forest. And planting a forest is next best to building a city.”
“Better,” said my father, “better. What kind of tree did you plant, daughter?” he inquired.
I hung my head. “I—we—there was a picnic,” I said. “We didn’t have to plant ’em. So we had a picnic.”
My father looked at me in the way that I remember.
“That’s it,” he said. “For everyone who plants a tree, there are half a dozen that have a picnic. And two dozen that cut them down. At last we’ve got one in the family who belongs to the majority!”
When I could, I slipped out in the garden. It was darkening; the frogs in the Slough were chorussing, and down on the river-bank a cat-bird sang at intervals, was silent long enough to make you think that he had ceased, and then burst forth again. The town clock struck eight, as if eight were an ancient thing, full of dignity. Our kitchen clock answered briskly, as if eight were a proud and novel experience of its own. The ’bus rattled past for the Eight-twenty. And away down in the garden, I heard a step. Someone had come in the back gate and clicked the pail of stones that weighted its chain.