When I had been gone, at least a fortnight, I should say—though I could not be certain about dates just then—to my Aunt Parslow’s at Leatherhead, my uncle having done all his grafting by himself, for there always was some to do every year, took a general look at his trees, and found that the buds looked as promising as ever he had seen them. He was rather surprised at this, not at all on account of the long hard winter, but because of the very cold wet summer and autumn which had preceded it. The trees would be full of unripe wood, and sappy shoots shrivelled by the frost, and scurfy bark, and perished boughs, and general discomfort, and sulkiness. At least everybody said that was how they ought to be, and my uncle had never contradicted them, preferring a little pessimism, because it is always the safer side. And probably upon cold, wet soils, all the evils predicted had succeeded, which would make it all the better for the places where they failed. So that my uncle, while sympathizing warmly with all his brother growers in their bad look-out, shook his head about his own, and smoked his pipe, and would not speak of his chickens, much less count them. But, when the sun began to get the upper hand of the days again, and the spring was looking through the hedge and into the hearts of the trees almost, and the earth seemed ready to lift its breast, as a maiden does for her flowers to be fixed, and every shrub that showed a leaf had got a bird to sing to it—for a time, the best man found it hard to make the worst of everything; and even the often frozen grower hoped not to be frozen again this year. For the later an English fruit-tree is in showing its white or pink challenge to the sky, the less is the chance of unheavenly heaven descending with a white blow, and smiting all to utter blackness. The ground had been frozen to a depth of twenty inches by the rigour of enduring frost; and after that the push of spring takes a long time to get down the line. “Tompkins,” said my uncle, who was poking about with a spade, to kill snails in some Iris roots, for no sort of winter makes much difference to a snail; drought in their breeding-time is all they care for much—“Tompkins, it is high time to be looking up our baskets. In another month, those fellows will be sticking it on again.” “That ’em will,” the long man replied. He was short of tongue, as a very tall man, by some ordinance of Nature, almost always is—perhaps because his fellow-creatures’ hats have endangered it while it was tender.