New England -- Juvenile fiction; United States -- History -- Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775 -- Juvenile fiction
“But it will not be his garden now,” she reflected drearily. “It will be
a place like any other, since I who plant it am not even one of his own
children. All that belonged to him has perished utterly.”
When the place was ready, however, when the old beds had been dug and
the former lawns sown with grass again, she bethought her of at least
one flower that she could plant and know it was still Master Simon’s. Up
on the forest hillside was that wonderful group of daffodils, set out by
his hand and waiting all these years to return to the garden whence they
came. With old Jason beside her, she toiled through the muddy lanes and
up through the wood, where buds were bursting on the trees and
Mayflowers were opening under the dry leaves. There she found what she
sought, the dear yellow flowers, flinging their gold down the slope like
long drifts of Spring sunshine. Two great basketfuls they brought home,
and set the sturdy plants in a long row by the fence where daffodils had
always grown since the first year that the Colony was settled.
And then there began a miracle, so it seemed, a wonder wrought only by
simple love and friendliness, but a miracle just the same. She was
lingering over the task of putting the last clump of daffodils in place
when through the gate came young Giles Thurston, twelve-year-old brother
to the good soldier David. To his house more than to any other she had
gone, during the years of want, and had given help when otherwise
starvation would have come very close.
“Please, Mistress,” said Giles, laying upon the ground a great awkward
bundle that he had been carrying in both arms, “I heard that you were
planting your garden and I have been wishing so much that I might bring
you something to grow there. Our own garden is bare and planted with
turnips and cabbages of which you surely have enough already, but up on
the hill is a tumble-down empty cottage with a rose vine growing all
over its broken walls. My mother says that an old woman named Goody
Parsons used to dwell there a long, long time ago and that the rose once
grew in Master Simon’s garden. See, I have brought you a root of it.
Mother put a slip into the ground the very first Spring after your
garden was burned. And here, too, is a part of Goody Parsons’ hawthorn
bush that I think must also have come from Master Simon.”
Poor old Goody Parsons, dead so many years and gone to that Heaven that
was to be like Hertfordshire, how she would have rejoiced to know that
her memory still lived and had offered back the gift that Master Simon
had given.
Most joyfully did Clotilde accept what the boy had brought and together
they went quickly to find the very place where the former plants had
grown. They set the rose below the easement window of the drawing-room
and the hawthorn bush close to the edge of the Queen’s garden.
“Now,” exclaimed Clotilde, “though all the rest be only mine, I can feel
that part of the garden at least still belongs to those who planted it.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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