You see that
mound over there, covered so snug and warm with burlap and sacking?
There my tulips and hyacinths sleep. In a few weeks, when the covering
is whisked off--ah, you shall see! Then one can be quite sure that the
spring is here. Who can look at a great bed of red and pink and lavender
and yellow tulips and hyacinths, and doubt it? Come."

With a quick gesture she threw a shawl over her head, and beckoned me.
Together we stepped out into the chill of the raw March afternoon. She
stood a moment, silent, gazing over the sodden earth. Then she flitted
swiftly down the narrow path, and halted before a queer little structure
of brick, covered with the skeleton of a creeping vine. Stooping, Alma
Pflugel pulled open the rusty iron door and smiled up at me.

"This was my grandmother's oven. All her bread she baked in this little
brick stove. Black bread it was, with a great thick crust, and a bitter
taste. But it was sweet, too. I have never tasted any so good. I like
to think of Grossmutter, when she was a bride, baking her first batch
of bread in this oven that Grossvater built for her. And because the old
oven was so very difficult to manage, and because she was such a young
thing--only sixteen!--I like to think that her first loaves were perhaps
not so successful, and that Grosspapa joked about them, and that the
little bride wept, so that the young husband had to kiss away the
tears."

She shut the rusty, sagging door very slowly and gently. "No doubt the
workmen who will come to prepare the ground for the new library will
laugh and joke among themselves when they see the oven, and they will
kick it with their heels, and wonder what the old brick mound could have
been."

There was a little twisted smile on her face as she rose--a smile that
brought a hot mist of tears to my eyes. There was tragedy itself in that
spare, homely figure standing there in the garden, the wind twining her
skirts about her.

"You should but see the children peering over the fence to see my
flowers in the summer," she said. The blue eyes wore a wistful, far-away
look. "All the children know my garden. It blooms from April to October.
There I have my sweet peas; and here my roses--thousands of them! Some
are as red as a drop of blood, and some as white as a bridal wreath.
When they are blossoming it makes the heart ache, it is so beautiful."

She had quite forgotten me now. For her the garden was all abloom once
more. It was as tho