but there will be scarcely a cherry on Ned’s tree. The winter was a hard one for the birds; and we suppose they were famine-struck; for they have picked out the heart of every blossom, leaving the sheaths to fall before the next breeze. Ned looks sorely tempted to cry. It is very hard that he can have no cherries, he thinks. Last year it was a late frost that ruined his prospect.
“We saved the gooseberries, however, and the low pear-tree,” observes Charley. And then we laugh at the remembrance of the scene. At this time last year we were returning from an early visit when we actually saw a film of ice on a puddle in the road. We hurried home, to save our fruit crops, as far as possible. We collected every foot of matting, and the maids’ aprons and the kitchen table-cloths destined for the next day’s wash, and covered every gooseberry bush, and length of wall, and low fruit-tree, as far as our materials would go. It was well worth while. There was ice everywhere the next morning. It was a sudden freak of Nature. There was no more frost; but that one night cost a friend of ours two hundred pounds. His cherry orchards were rendered barren for the year, at that cost.
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We cannot afford any carelessness now about our fruit. There have been signs of aphides on the peach trees; and the leaf-rollers hurt the apricots so seriously last year that we must see that it does not happen again. All boys like squirting; and mine as well as any. We are to infuse some tobacco to-morrow; and they undertake to syringe away the aphides, as long as their holiday lasts. They propose also to burn some wet straw under almost every tree in the orchard, to make short work with all manner of insects. This kind of sport is more to their taste than regular garden-work: but they honestly intend to do all that is wanted;—to sow more peas, and various beans; to stick whatever wants support, and to make use of every foot of their little kitchen gardens, in order to profit by my offers of farm-yard privileges. Just at this time we are clearing and cleaning out the yards, on the removal of the ewes and lambs to the water-meadows, and of the cattle to the uplands for the day; and there is plenty of manure for all my young gardeners. If they find they cannot get through half the engagements they are making this evening, they shall have help from the gardener. Not one of these precious April days must be wasted: and it will be a sad drawback on the summer holidays if the peas, and strawberries, and young potatoes, and green gooseberries, and green apricots fall short of expectation.
By the time all this is discussed, it is dusk. We fall into silence as we follow one another through the plantation, so that, when we come out upon the lawn we hear a remote aërial song which makes us stop and look up. It is no doubt the skylark, though we cannot see it in the high reddish region of the atmosphere. I know its evening note, more subdued and regular than its morning outburst. We stand and listen before stepping in at the bay-window; but it is presently over. “Only till the morning,” observes Ned, already longing for to-morrow.
That to-morrow is now yesterday.
