Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 8.djvu/193

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ONE SUMMER. A REMINISCENCE.

By Annie Wentworth Baer.

It was a beautiful morning in June. The sun was just peeping through the pines fringing the eastern horizon; fleecy mists were rising, like "ghosts of the valley," from every brook and low place in field and pasture, betokening a warm, fair day. As I opened the heavy front door of Mr. Wetherell's old gambrel-roofed house, and stepped out onto the large flat stone at the door-sill, every blade of grass was glistening with dew-drops; such a sweetness pervaded the air as one only realizes when the dew is on the grass and bushes. At my right, close to the door-stone, a large bush of southern- wood, or man's-first-love, was growing; just beyond it and under the "middle-room" windows two large, white-rose bushes were bending beneath the weight of a multitude of roses and buds. A large yellow-rose bush claimed the left, and spread itself over the ground. Single red roses were standing guard at the corner of the house. A rod or more below the front door the garden fence stood and looked as if it had been standing for many a year. It was made of palings, pointed; I should think it was five feet high. The posts had begun to lean into the garden and the palings were covered with a short green moss, which seemed soft and growing in the dew. The old gate swung itself to after me with a bang, and I noticed that a string with a brick fastened to it and tied to the gate at one end, and twisted around a stake driven into the ground a few feet from the gate, was the cause of its closing so quickly. Red-cherry trees loaded with small green cherries were growing on one side of the garden; purple-plum trees skirted the other side; and I knew full well how two months later those creased, mouldy- looking plums would be found hiding in the short, green grass beneath the trees.

Peach-trees were leaning over the fence in the southeast corner; a long row of red-currant bushes ran through the middle of the garden; English gooseberry bushes threw out their prickly branches laden with round, woolly fruit at the north end. Rows of hyssop, rue, saffron, and sage, and beds of lettuce, pepper-grass, and cives, all had their place in this old-fashioned garden. In the southwest corner an immense black-currant bush was growing on both sides of the fence. Out