one in the orchard, for instance, some pruning and
scraping. I always go into the orchard on the first really warm,
spring-like March day, with a common hoe, and scrape a little, not so
much for the good of the trees as for the good of my soul. The real
scraping for the scale spray was, of course, done earlier. There is a
curious, faintly putrid smell to old or bruised apple wood, which is
stirred by my scraping, and that smell sweeps over me a wave of
memories, memories of childhood in a great yellow house that stood
back from the road almost in its orchard, and boasted a cupola with
panes of colored glass which made the familiar landscape strange;
memories of youth in that same house, too, dim memories "of sweet,
forgotten, wistful things." My early spring afternoons in the orchard
are very precious to me now, and when the weather permits I always try
to burn the rubbish and dead prunings on Good Friday, the incense of
the apple wood floating across the brown garden like a prayer, the
precious ashes sinking down to enrich the soil.

The bees, too, are always a welcome sign of the returning season,
hardly less than the birds, though the advent of the white-throated
sparrow (who delayed till April twenty-first last year) is always a
great event. He is first heard most often before breakfast, in an
apple tree close to the sleeping-porch, his flute-like triplets
sweetly penetrating my dreams and bringing me gladly out of
bed--something he alone can do, by the way, and not even he after the
first morning! But the bees come long before. The earliest record I
have is March thirty-first, but there must be dates before that which
I have neglected to put down. Some house plant, a hyacinth possibly,
is used as bait, and when the ground is thawing out beneath a warm
spring sun we put the plant on the southern veranda and watch. Day
after day nothing happens, then suddenly, some noon, it has scarcely
been set on the ground when its blossoms stir, and it is murmurous
with bees. Then we know that spring indeed has come, and we begin to
rake the lawns, wherever the frost is out, wheeling great crate loads
of leaves and rubbish upon the garden, and filling our neighbors'
houses with pungent smoke.

There is a certain spot between the thumb and first finger which
neither axe nor golf-club nor saw handle seems to callous. The spring
raking finds it out, and gleefully starts to raise a blister. My hands
are perpetually those of a day-l