bower, smothering the old house in beauty,
brooding over it, on still moonlight nights, in pale clouds of
sweetness. And then comes a wind, with a drenching rain, and tears away
all the pretty petals and buries them in the grass below. But there are
seldom any apples; all this exuberance of beauty is but a dream of
youth, not a promise of fruitage. Jonathan, indeed, tells me that if we
want the trees to bear we must keep pigs in the orchard to root up the
ground and eat the wormy fruit as it falls; but under these conditions I
would rather not have the apples. The orchard is old; why not leave it
to dream and rest and dream again?

The old associations are, I admit, of a somewhat mixed character. There
is the romance of the milk-room door, through which, in hoary ages past,
the "hired girl," at the ripe age of twelve, eloped with her
sixteen-year-old lover; there is the story of the cellar nail, a
shuddery one, handed down from a yet more remote antiquity; there are
tales of the "ballroom" on the second floor, of the old lightning-riven
locust stump, of the origin of the "new wing" of the house--still called
"new," though a century old. Not a spot, indoors or out, but has its
clustering memories.

Such an enveloping atmosphere of associations, no matter what their
quality, in a place where generations have lived and died, is of itself
a quieting thing. Life, incrusted with tradition, like a ship weighted
with barnacles, moves more and more slowly; the past appears more real
than the present. To the old this seems natural and right, to others it
is often depressing; but Jonathan and I like it. Our barnacle-clogged
ship pleases us--pleases me because I love the slow, drifting motion,
pleases Jonathan because--I regret to admit it--he thinks he can get all
the barnacles off--and then!--

For, whereas my unprogressiveness is absolute and unqualified,
Jonathan's is, I have discovered, tainted by a sneaking optimism, an
ineradicable desire and hope of improvement, which, though it does not
blossom rankly in pergolas and tea-houses, is none the less there, a
lurking menace. It inspired his suggestion regarding pigs in the
orchard, it showed itself even more clearly in the matter of the hens.

I have always liked hens. I doubt if mine are very profitable,--the farm
is not, in general, a source of profit, and we cherish no delusions
about it,--but I do not keep them for pecuniary gain. If they chance to
lay eggs, so much the