ancient garden the
imagination of a child found wings for many an airy flight. The town
itself bore the name of the English nobleman, well known in
Revolutionary days. Not far away his mansion sturdily defied the touch
of time and decay, and admonished the men of a degenerate present to
remember their glorious past. The house that sheltered me that summer
was known in colonial days as the Black-Horse Tavern. Its walls had
echoed to the tread of patriot and tory, who gathered here to drink a
health to General Washington or to King George; and patriot, and tory,
too, had trod the paths of the garden and plucked its flowers and its
fruit in the times that tried men's souls. By the back gate grew a
strawberry apple tree, and every morning the dewy grass held a night's
windfall of the tiny red apples that were the reward of the child who
rose earliest. A wonderful grafted tree that bore two kinds of fruit
gave the place a touch of fairyland's magic, and no explanation of the
process of grafting ever diminished the awe I felt when I stood under
this tree and saw ripe spice apples growing on one limb and green
winter pearmains on all the others. The pound sweeting, the
spitzenberg, and many sister apples were there; and I stayed long
enough to see them ripen into perfection. While they ripened I
gathered the jewel-like clusters of red and white currants and a
certain rare English gooseberry which English hands had brought from
beyond the seas and planted here when the sign of the Black-Horse
swung over the tavern door. The ordinary gooseberry is a plebeian
fruit, but this one was more patrician than its name, and its name was
"the King George." Twice as large as the common kind, translucent and
yellowish white when fully ripe, and of an incomparable sweetness and
flavor, it could have graced a king's table and held its own with the
delicate strawberry or the regal grape. And then, best of all, it was
a forbidden fruit, whereof we children ate by stealth, and solemnly
declared that we had not eaten. Could the Garden of the Hesperides
have held more charms?

At the end of the long Dutch "stoop" I found the wands of the
snowberry, whose tiny flowers have the odor and color of the trailing
arbutus, and whose waxen berries reminded me of the crimson
"buckberry" of Southern fields. Fuchsias and dark-red clove pinks grew
in a peculiarly rich and sunny spot by the back fence, and over a pot
of the musk-plant I used to hang as Isabell