country place seem to spend such a lot of energy doing things for
themselves that nature is doing for them just over the fence. There was
Christabel Vincent last summer, grubbing over yellow lilies, or
something, and I went over into the meadow and got a lovely armful of
lilies and brought them in, and no grubbing at all."

"Perhaps grubbing was what she was after," said Jonathan.

"Well, anyway, she talked as if it was lilies."

"I don't know that that matters," he said.

Jonathan is sometimes so acute about my friends that it is almost
annoying.

* * * * *

This conversation was one of many that occurred the winter before we
took up the farm. We went up in April that year, and we planted our corn
and our potatoes and all the rest, but no flowers. That part we left to
nature, and she responded most generously. From earliest spring until
October--nay, November--we were never without flowers: brave little
white saxifrage and hepaticas, first of all, then bloodroot and arbutus,
adder's-tongue and columbine, shad-blow and dogwood, and all the beloved
throng of them, at our feet and overhead. In May the pink azalea and the
buttercups, in June the laurel and the daisies and--almost best of
all--the dear clover. In summer the deep woods gave us orchids, and the
open meadows lilies and black-eyed Susans. In September the river-banks
and the brooks glowed for us with cardinal-flower and the blue lobelia,
and then, until the frosts settled into winter, there were the fringed
gentians and the asters and the goldenrod. And still the half has not
been told. If I tried to name all that gay company, my tale would be
longer than Homer's catalogue of the ships.

In early July a friend brought me in a big bunch of sweet peas. I buried
my face in their sweetness; then, as I held them off, I sighed.

"Oh, dear!" I said.

"What's 'oh, dear'?" said Jonathan, as he took off his ankle-clips. He
had just come up from the station on his bicycle.

"Nothing. Only why do people have magenta sweet peas with red ones and
pink ones--that special pink? It's just the color of pink tooth-powder."

"You might throw away the ones you don't like."

"No, I can't do that. But why does anybody grow them? If I had sweet
peas, I'd have white ones, and pale lavender ones, and those lovely
salmon-pink ones, and maybe some pale yellow ones--"

"Sweet peas have to be planted in March," said Jonathan, as he trundled
hi