aborer, yet I expect that blister
every spring. Indeed, I am rather disappointed now if I don't get it,
I feel as if I weren't doing my share of work. The work is worth the
blister. I know of few sensations more delightful than that of seeing
the lawn emerging green and clean beneath your rake, the damp mould
baring itself under the shrubbery, the paths, freshly edged, nicely
scarrowed with tooth marks; then of feeling the tug of the barrow
handles in your shoulder sockets; and finally, as the sun is sending
long shadows over the ground, of standing beside the rubbish pile with
your rake as a poker and hearing the red flames crackle and roar
through the heap, while great puffs of beautiful brown smoke go
rolling away across the garden and the warmth is good to your tired
body. Clearing up is such a delight, indeed, that I cannot now
comprehend why I so intensely disliked to do it when I was half my
present age. Perhaps it was because at that time clearing up was put
to me in the light of a duty, not a pleasure.

There is alas, too often a tempering of sadness in the joy of taking
the covers off the garden. One removes them, especially after a cold
open winter, with much the same anxious excitement that one opens a
long-delayed letter from a dear friend who has been in danger. What
signs of life will the peonies show under their four inches of rotted
manure, and the Japanese irises by the pool, and the beds of Darwins,
so confidently relied upon to ring the sundial in late May and early
June, before the succeeding annuals are ready? How will the
hollyhocks, so stately in midsummer all down the garden wall, have
withstood the alternate thaws and freezes which characterized our
abominable January and February? Then there are those two long rows of
foxgloves and Canterbury bells, across the rear of the vegetable
garden, where they were set in the fall to make strong plants before
being put in their permanent places--or rather their season's places,
for these lovely flowers are perversely biennials, and at least seven
times every spring I vow I will never bother with them again, and then
make an even larger sowing when their stately stalks and sky-blue
bells are abloom in summer! Tenderly you lift the pine boughs from
them on a balmy April day (it was not until almost mid-April last
year), when snow still lingers, perhaps, in dirty patches on the north
side of the evergreens. Will they show frozen, flabby, withered
leaves,