quite old and
rather hard of hearing, and she lived alone in the gloomy old house with
the Lombardy poplars in front, where everything looked dark and shut up.
A queer woman in a sunbonnet, nearly as old as Mrs. Bush, lived close
by, and "kept an eye on her," as she said.

Mrs. Bush's great enjoyment was to have visitors of all ages, to whom
she talked a great deal, and cried as she talked, about a daughter who
had died a few years ago. The little Kyles did not care to go there
except when, as Edith said, there were ripe mulberries; but Mrs. Bush
liked very much to have them, and Miss Harson took her little charges
there occasionally, because, as she explained to them, it gave pleasure
to a lonely old woman, and such visits were just as much charity, though
of a different kind, as giving food and clothes to those who need them.
The children delighted in the mulberries just because they did not have
them at home, although they had fruit that was very much nicer; but Miss
Harson never wished even to taste them, although she too had liked them
when a little girl.

"The mulberry tree," continued their governess, "belongs to the
bread-fruit family, but the other members of this remarkable family,
except the Osage orange, are found only in foreign countries. The
bread-fruit tree itself, the fig, the Indian fig, or banyan tree, and
the deadly upas tree, are all relations of the mulberry."

"Well, trees are queer things," exclaimed Malcolm, "to belong to
families that are not a bit alike."

"They are alike in important points, when we examine them carefully,"
was the reply. "The bread-fruit genus consists, with a single exception,
of trees and shrubs with alternate, toothed or lobed or entire leaves
and milky juice. This reminds me that the famous cow tree of South
America, which yields a large supply of rich and wholesome milk, is one
of the members; and you see what a number of famous trees we have on
hand now. There are several kinds of mulberries--the red, black, white
and paper mulberry, which are all occasionally found in this country,
and they were once quite popular here for their shade. The fruit is
unusually small for tree-fruit, and very soft when ripe, as you all
know; it is not unlike a long, narrow blackberry, and forms, like it, a
compound fruit, as though many small berries had grown together. The
tree in Mrs. Bush's garden is the black mulberry, as any one might know
by the stained lips and hands that some