and would have been as well pleased if some of
my choicest fruit-trees had not overhung their wall. I determined to
keep my eyes open later in the season, when the fruit should be ripe to
pluck. In some folks, a sense of the delicate shades of difference
between _meum_ and _tuum_ does not seem to be very strongly developed in
the Moon of Cherries, to use the old Indian phrase.

I was sufficiently magnanimous not to impart any of these sinister
impressions to the families with whom we were on visiting terms; for I
despise a gossip. I would say nothing against the persons up the road
until I had something definite to say. My interest in them was--well,
not exactly extinguished, but burning low. I met the gentleman at
intervals, and passed him without recognition; at rarer intervals I saw
the lady.

After a while I not only missed my occasional glimpses of her pretty,
slim figure, always draped in some soft black stuff with a bit of
scarlet at the throat, but I inferred that she did not go about the
house singing in her light-hearted manner, as formerly. What had
happened? Had the honeymoon suffered eclipse already? Was she ill? I
fancied she was ill, and that I detected a certain anxiety in the
husband, who spent the mornings digging solitarily in the garden, and
seemed to have relinquished those long jaunts to the brow of Blue Hill,
where there is a superb view of all Norfolk County combined with sundry
venerable rattlesnakes with twelve rattles.

As the days went by it became certain that the lady was confined to the
house, perhaps seriously ill, possibly a confirmed invalid. Whether she
was attended by a physician from Canton or from Milton, I was unable to
say; but neither the gig with the large white allopathic horse, nor the
gig with the homoeopathic sorrel mare, was ever seen hitched at the
gate during the day. If a physician had charge of the case, he visited
his patient only at night. All this moved my sympathy, and I reproached
myself with having had hard thoughts of our neighbors. Trouble had come
to them early. I would have liked to offer them such small, friendly
services as lay in my power; but the memory of the repulse I had
sustained still rankled in me. So I hesitated.

One morning my two boys burst into the library with their eyes
sparkling.

"You know the old elm down the road?" cried one.

"Yes."

"The elm with the hang-bird's nest?" shrieked the other.

"Yes, yes!"

"Well, we both just cli