n the spot; but he smiled sadly and
said, "_Good_-mornin'," and seemed pleased when the girls praised his
garden. "Ee-yus!" he said, with placid melancholy. "I've seen wuss
places. Minglin' the blooms with the truck and herbs was my idee, as you
may say,--'livens up one, and sobers down the other. _She_ laughs at me,
but she don't keer, s'long as she has all she wants. Cut ye some
mignonette? That's very favoryte with me,--very favoryte."

He cut a great bunch of mignonette; and Rose, proffering her request for
lavender, received a nosegay as big as she could hold in both hands.

"The roses is just comin' on," he said. "Over behind them beans they
are. A sight o' roses there'll be in another week. Coreopsis is pooty,
too; that's down the other side of the corn. Curus garding, folks
thinks; but, there, it's my idee, and she don't keer."

Much amused, the girls thanked the melancholy prophet, and wandered away
into the orchard, to find the seat that Miss Wealthy had told them of.

"Oh, what a lovely, lovely orchard!" cried Hildegarde, in delight; and
indeed it was a pretty place. The apple-trees were old, and curiously
gnarled and twisted, bending this way and that, as apple-trees will. The
short, fine grass was like emerald; there were no flowers at all, only
green and brown, with the sunlight flickering through the branches
overhead. They found the seat, which was curiously wedged into the
double trunk of the very patriarch of apple-trees.

"Do look at him!" cried Hildegarde. "He is like a giant with the
rheumatism. Suppose we call him Blunderbore. What does twist them so,
Rose? Look! there is one with a trunk almost horizontal."

"I don't know," said Rose, slowly. "Another item for the ignorance list,
Hilda. It is growing appallingly long. I really _don't_ know why they
twist so. In the forest they grow much taller than in orchards, and go
straight up. Farmer Hartley has seen one seventy feet high, he says."

"Let us call it vegetable rheumatism!" said Hildegarde. "How _is_ your
poor back this morning, ma'am?" She addressed an ancient tree with
respectful sympathy; indeed, it did look like an aged dame bent almost
double. "Have you ever tried Pond's Extract? I think I must really buy a
gallon or so for you. And as long as you must bend over, you will not
mind if I take a little walk along your suffering spine, and sit on your
arm, will you?"

She walked up the tree, and seated herself on a branch which was crook