When Life Was Young Part 2

"And Halstead?"

I replied that he was in the orchard a few minutes ago.

"He's gone now," said she, glancing through the trees. "Let's go find Addison."

No long search was necessary. She led the way directly up-stairs to his room and tapped at the door. There was a moment's skurry inside and a voice said, "Who's there?"

"Doad,"--with a smile to me.

The key turned and Addison looked out.

"I have brought our new cousin," she said. "Can we come in?"

"Yes," said he, hesitantly, with a backward glance into the room. "Come in. Halse isn't there, is he?"

"No, Halse has gone, again," said Theodora.

They looked at each other significantly. Addison then opened the door and bustled about, clearing out chairs for us. The room seemed filled with things. On one side there was a great cupboard, stuffed, in a helter-skelter way, with books, papers and magazines. Farther along stood a bureau upon the top of which were set several bottles. A hat-tree in the corner had, perched upon it, a stuffed crow, a hawk and a blue jay with bright gla.s.s eyes. A rough shelf had been put up along one end, on which lay many glistening stones of all sorts and sizes; and on the bed was a large book, open to some cuts of birds.

"Naughty boy!" exclaimed Theodora, pointing to several loose feathers on the bed and on the floor. "What did you promise me?"

Addison reddened.

"No, I will not hush it up!" cried Theodora. "You deserve to be exposed!

A youth who breaks his promises! You shall show us what you've been doing. I know where you have hidden it!" Before he could hinder her, she threw back the pillow and lo! more feathers and a small white and black bird! "Ah-ha, sir!" she exclaimed. "Didn't you say that you would not 'mount' another bird, Sunday?"

"Yes, I did, I own I did," said Addison. "But I only got this bobolink last night. He would spoil, if I let him go till Monday. Besides, I shall have to work then. And (holding him up) he's such a little beauty that I couldn't bear to lose him."

This last appeal disarmed Theodora. "We will pa.s.s it over this time,"

she said; "but (lowering her voice) you must not 'stuff' birds, Sunday.

Yet now that you've broken the Commandment in your heart, by beginning, perhaps you might as well finish it. So we will both go off and let you get through with your wickedness as soon as you can."

"Addison is a real good cousin," Theodora said to me, apologetically, as we returned to the orchard. "He is one of the nicest boys I ever saw. He almost never gets angry, and always speaks in a gentlemanly way to grandfather and grandmother; and he is real good to us girls, whenever we have anything hard to do, or want to make flower boxes, or spade up our flower beds. He knows the different kinds of rocks and trees and flowers, and the birds, too, and all about their nests and where they go winters. Uncle William, you know, was a teacher, the preceptor of an Academy; he understood botany and mineralogy and taught Ad when he was a little boy. Addison means to get a college education, if he can make his way to do it.

"I should like to get a good education, too," Theodora added after awhile. "Have you any plans of your own?"

I replied that I had no plans as yet; but that I, too, would like to attend school.

"We all go to the district school here," said Theodora, "and we can learn a good deal, if we study well. But I should like to go to a more advanced school when I get a little older, so that I could be a teacher myself, perhaps; though I would rather be something else than a teacher," she added.

"What is that?" I asked.

"Oh, I don't quite like to tell you that just yet," she said.

"I am going to show you the good apple trees," she continued, and led the way through the orchard. "These three great ones, here below the garden wall, are Orange Speck trees; they are real nice apples for winter; and there is the Gilliflower tree. Over here is the Early Sweet Bough; and that big one is the August Sweeting; and out there are the three August Pippins. All those away down there toward the road are Baldwins and Greenings. Those two by the lane wall are None Such trees.

Out there by the corn-field wall are four Sweet Harvey trees and next below them, two Georgianas. I learned all their names last year. But this one here by the currant bushes is a Sops-in-wine. Oh, they are so good! and they get ripe early, too, and so do the August Pippins and the Harveys and the August Sweetings; they are all nice. Those small trees just below the barnyard fence are pears, Bartlett pears, luscious ones!

and those vines on the trellises are the Isabella and Concord grapes; some years grapes don't get ripe up here in Maine; but they did last year, pretty ripe, in October. Grandfather carried some of them to the County Fair and lots of the apples; he had over forty different kinds of fruit on exhibition. We girls went with him and placed the apples and pears and the grapes on plates, in the Fair building. You will go with us this year, I suppose.

"All this ground here is planted to beets and carrots and turnips. You mustn't step on it," my pleasant-voiced cousin admonished me. "And we will not go up very close to that little shed there. That is the bee-house. See all those hives! The bees will sometimes sting any one they don't know. Ad isn't afraid of them; I am not much afraid; they have never stung me. They sting Halstead like sport, if he goes up in front of the hives. Grandfather puts on a veil and some gloves and takes them off the apple tree limbs, when they swarm. Ellen is afraid of them, too; but Wealthy will go up and sit right down in her little chair, close by that biggest, old, dark-colored hive. There's an enormous swarm in that hive; and they send out two or three young swarms every year; that is one of them in the white, tall hive there at the end of the shed.

"Last year robber bees came out of the woods and attacked that hive with the red cap-piece on it. Ad watched them all through one day and threw hot water on the robbers. You'll see lots of excitement here when a swarm comes out and grandfather has to hive them. They got fifty cents a pound for the honey one year; but it isn't so high now. In the winter the hives stand right out in the cold and snowdrifts. In February, last winter, the drift in front of the shed was higher than the shed itself.

Grandfather stops up the holes into the hives, that's all; and in March, before the snow is gone, the bees sometimes come out and get the honey-sap on the birch and maple logs, when the men-folks are working up the big woodpile in front of the wood-shed."

Ellen and Wealthy saw us talking by the bee-house, and approached the garden gate. "Come down here, girls, and get acquainted with our new cousin," Theodora called to them.

"Don't say much to them at first," she continued to me in a lower tone.

"They are bashful."

Being in much the same case, I looked another way while the two girls joined us, Theodora having for the moment directed my attention to a tremendously large queen b.u.mble-bee which came booming along the ground and began burrowing in a little heap of dry gra.s.s.

"Halstead says those big b.u.mble-bees are the kings," Wealthy ventured to remark.

"Well, that is not right," said Ellen. "For Ad says they are the queens."

Theodora looked at me and laughed. "You see Ad's word is law," she said.

"But now I want to show you Gram's geese."

We climbed the garden wall and went around a large shed which joined the "west barn" and then down into a little hollow behind it, where a rill from a spring had been dammed to form a goose-pond, fifty or sixty feet across. Near by the pond, in the edge of a potato field, we found the geese, seven of them and a gander, which latter extended an aquatic, pink beak and hissed his displeasure at our approach. "Go back, Job!"

Theodora said to him; Wealthy stepped to the rear of the others, being still a little afraid of "Job." He was a grievous biter, Theodora informed me, and had bitten her several times, till she had given him a switching for it.

"Two old geese are sitting on eggs in a goose-house, under the shed, near the barn," Ellen said. "That's what makes Job so valiant. It's most time for them to hatch the goslings; Gram has given us strict orders not to go nigh them."

My new cousins, having undertaken to show me the sights of the farm, conducted me next to the large old barns, now empty of hay, disclosing yawning hay bays, weathered brown beams and grain scaffolds.

On this Sabbath morning, the cobwebbed roofs were vocal with the twitterings of many tireless, happy swallows, whose mud nests were placed against the dusty ribs and rafters. Three comma-shaped swallow-holes in the gable gave them access to the inside, where for two generations of men they had found a safe breeding-place. Less safe and less fortunate were the eaves swallows, a row of whose mud nests was placed along one side of the barn, beneath the eaves without; for wind, sun and rain often caused their nests to fall; crows, too, at times stole up and plundered them; and weasels playing along the margin of the roof, had been known to throttle the fledglings.

"He must go and see the 'Little Sea,'" said Ellen.

"Yes, cousin," Theodora said, "you have no doubt heard of the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea and the Mediterranean Sea; but up here at Gramp's we have a new sea that no geographer has yet put down on the map. It isn't every day that anybody can discover a new sea, you know."

Ellen and Wealthy led the way across the fields toward the east side of the farm; we crossed the road and descended through a wide field of gra.s.s land, and came to a broad stone wall, extending for near half a mile betwixt the fields and the pastures. Here grew a long, irregular row of wild red cherry trees and black cherry trees, now just past the season of bloom.

"The cherries off some of these trees are fine to eat," Theodora remarked as we stood on the wall and looked about. "This one here is Gramp's tree," she said. "Those off this tree are nearly half as large as the 'tame' cherries; and this one by the rock is my tree; and those out by the pine stump are Ellen's and Wealthy's. Halstead claims a whole row of those higher up; he talks large if any of us rob his trees; but the birds get the most of them. Ad thinks they are not really fit to eat and says there is danger in swallowing the stones. We have enough of the large, tame cherries, too, all through July and until the first of August. Those trees that you saw along the barnyard fence of the north barn are the tame cherry trees. The black cherries do not get ripe till later; October is the month for them. They are nice when real glossy black and ripe, after the first frosts. The trees are just loaded down with them, sometimes; and right there, by that double tree, is where Uncle Henry and Uncle Edmund (your father) saw a bear in the tree, or in a tree that stood there then; it may not be the same one, but it was a cherry tree. The bear was up in the tree, getting cherries. He would reach out and pull in the branches with his paws, and then draw the little twigs, all covered with cherries, through his big mouth and sc.r.a.pe off a lot at once. That was what he was doing there, and he had broken the top of the tree half off. The boys heard the green limbs creaking and cracking, and the tree shaking under the bear's weight. So they stole up and stood on the wall to look; and pretty soon they saw his black hair amongst the leaves; but the bear was so busy eating cherries that he did not notice them. They had no gun, so they each picked up a good big stone and both threw at once; and one of them hit the bear, thump, on his back! It took him by surprise, I expect, and his mouth being so full of leaves and cherries, he sucked some of them down the wrong way, maybe; for they said the old fellow gave an awful cough!--and then started to slide down the tree. At that they both turned and ran, like sport, for the house; for they imagined the old bear meant to pay them back for that stone that had hit him."

"Did the bear chase them?" I cried.

"I rather think not," replied Theodora. "I didn't hear that he did."

"Are there bears around here now?" I inquired.

"Not many; they don't come around the buildings now as they did when our fathers were boys."

"Old 'Three-Legs' comes into the sheep-pasture after the sheep," said Ellen.

"Yes, and Halstead says he saw him when he was looking for the cows, one night this spring," said Wealthy.

"Is 'Three-Legs' a bear?" I asked, greatly interested.

"Yes, a very bold, cunning old bear that lost his right foot in a trap years ago," Ellen explained. "Halstead says he saw him about a month ago."