the change was too much for Hunka-munka, for she
saddened and lost vigor. Her deep-dish pies became savorless, the
whipped cream smeary and sad of taste. She went the way of all cooks,
and if it had not been spring, with the buds breaking and the birds
calling and the trout leaping in the brook, we should have grieved as
over a broken song.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

I

_We planted a number of things_

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The whistle of a bird means spring; the poking through of the
skunk-cabbage in low ground, the growing green mist upon the woods. But
there is one thing that has more positive spring in it than any of
these--more of the stir and throb of awakening, something identified
with that earliest impulse that prompted some remote ancestor to make
the first garden. I mean the smell of freshly turned earth with the sun
on it. Nothing else is like that; there is a kind of madness in it.
Elizabeth said it was a poem. It is that and something more--a paean, a
marching song--a summons to battle.

Luther Merrill came up to plow the space back of the barn. When he had
turned up a furrow or so to the warm April sun, and I got a whiff of it,
reason fled. I began capering about with a rake and a hoe, shouting to
Elizabeth to bring the seeds--all the seeds--also the catalogues, so
that we might order more. Why, those little packages were only a
beginning! We must have pounds, quarts, bushels. And we must have other
things--sweet-potatoes, for instance, and asparagus--we have overlooked
those.

Elizabeth came, and was bitten by that smell, too, but she partially
kept her balance. She was in favor of the asparagus and sweet-potatoes,
but she said she thought we had better plant what we had of the other
things and see how far they would go, before ordering more. She said the
seed-houses would probably have enough to go around even a week or so
later, and we could use what we had on hand in making what the
catalogues referred to as the "first sowing." I was not entirely
satisfied, but I submitted. I was too much excited, too glad, to oppose
anything. Luther Merrill plowed around and around, and then harrowed
and cross-harrowed, while we sorted the yellow packets and picked the
earliest things and were presently raking and marking on beds and rows,
warm with the fever of tillage.

We did not always agree as to the order of planting. In our small
commuter garden we had been restricted by space limitations