I dare say that she was
thinking of her garden that very day, and wondering if this plant or
that were not in bloom, and perhaps had a heartache at the thought
that her tenants, the careless colored children, might tread the young
shoots of peony and rose, and make havoc in the herb-bed. It was an
uncommon collection, made by years of patient toil and self-sacrifice.
I thought of that deserted Southern garden as I followed my own New
England road. The flower-plots were in gay bloom all along the way;
almost every house had some flowers before it, sometimes carefully
fenced about by stakes and barrel staves from the miscreant hens and
chickens which lurked everywhere, and liked a good scratch and
fluffing in soft earth this year as well as any other. The world
seemed full of young life. There were calves tethered in pleasant
shady spots, and puppies and kittens adventuring from the doorways.
The trees were full of birds: bobolinks, and cat-birds, and
yellow-hammers, and golden robins, and sometimes a thrush, for the
afternoon was wearing late. We passed the spring which once marked the
boundary where three towns met,--Berwick, York, and Wells,--a famous
spot in the early settlement of the country, but many of its old
traditions are now forgotten. One of the omnipresent regicides of
Charles the First is believed to have hidden himself for a long time
under a great rock close by. The story runs that he made his miserable
home in this den for several years, but I believe that there is no
record that more than three of the regicides escaped to this country,
and their wanderings are otherwise accounted for.
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