n and watched them. Antonia leaned her elbows on the table.
There was the deepest peace in that orchard. It was surrounded by a triple
enclosure; the wire fence, then the hedge of thorny locusts, then the
mulberry hedge which kept out the hot winds of summer and held fast to the
protecting snows of winter. The hedges were so tall that we could see
nothing but the blue sky above them, neither the barn roof nor the
windmill. The afternoon sun poured down on us through the drying grape
leaves. The orchard seemed full of sun, like a cup, and we could smell the
ripe apples on the trees. The crabs hung on the branches as thick as beads
on a string, purple-red, with a thin silvery glaze over them. Some hens
and ducks had crept through the hedge and were pecking at the fallen
apples. The drakes were handsome fellows, with pinkish gray bodies, their
heads and necks covered with iridescent green feathers which grew close
and full, changing to blue like a peacock's neck. Antonia said they always
reminded her of soldiers--some uniform she had seen in the old country,
when she was a child.

"Are there any quail left now?" I asked. I reminded her how she used to go
hunting with me the last summer before we moved to town. "You were n't a
bad shot, Tony. Do you remember how you used to want to run away and go
for ducks with Charley Harling and me?"

"I know, but I'm afraid to look at a gun now." She picked up one of the
drakes and ruffled his green capote with her fingers. "Ever since I've had
children, I don't like to kill anything. It makes me kind of faint to
wring an old goose's neck. Ain't that strange, Jim?"

"I don't know. The young Queen of Italy said the same thing once, to a
friend of mine. She used to be a great huntswoman, but now she feels as
you do, and only shoots clay pigeons."

"Then I'm sure she's a good mother," Antonia said warmly.

She told me how she and her husband had come out to this new country when
the farm land was cheap and could be had on easy payments. The first ten
years were a hard struggle. Her husband knew very little about farming and
often grew discouraged. "We'd never have got through if I had n't been so
strong. I've always had good health, thank God, and I was able to help him
in the fields until right up to the time before my babies came. Our
children were good about taking care of each other. Martha, the one you
saw when she was a baby, was such a help to me, and she trained Anna to be
just