We can fancy how delighted all these Oriental shrubs and flowers were to meet after so many years of separation. What pleasant greetings all the cousins must have given each other; I am sure the Wistaria was glad to see the Lilac, and the Fortune's Yellow Rose was duly respectful to his old cousin, the thorny yellow Scotch Rose. And I seem to hear a bit of scandal passing from plant to plant! Listen! it is the Bleeding-heart gossiping with the Japanese Anemone: "Well! I never thought that Lilac girl would grow to be such a beauty. So much color! Do you suppose it can be natural? Mrs. Tulip hinted to me yesterday that the girl used fertilizers, and it certainly looks so. But she can't say much herself--I never saw such a change in any creatures as in those Tulips. You remember how commonplace their clothes were? Now such extravagance! Scores of gowns, and all made abroad, and at _her_ age! Here are you and I, my dear, both young, and we really ought to have more clothes. I haven't a thing but this pink gown to put on. It's lucky you had a white gown, for no one liked your pink one. Here comes Mrs. Rose! How those Rose children have grown! I never should have known them." CHAPTER VIII COMFORT ME WITH APPLES "What can your eye desire to see, your eares to heare, your mouth to taste, or your nose to smell, that is not to be had in an Orchard? with Abundance and Variety? What shall I say? 1000 of Delights are in an Orchard; and sooner shall I be weary than I can reckon the least part of that pleasure which one, that hath and loves an Orchard, may find therein." --_A New Orchard_, WILLIAM LAWSON, 1618. In every old-time garden, save the revered front yard, the borders stretched into the domain of the Currant and Gooseberry bushes, and into the orchard. Often a row of Crabapple trees pressed up into the garden's precincts and shaded the Sweet Peas. Orchard and garden could scarcely be separated, so closely did they grow up together. Every old garden book had long chapters on orchards, written _con amore_, with a zest sometimes lacking on other pages. How they loved in the days of Queen Elizabeth and of Queen Anne to sit in an orchard, planted, as Sir Philip Sidney said, "cunningly with trees of taste-pleasing fruits." How charming were their orchard seats, "fachoned for meditacon!" Sometimes these orchard seats were banks of the strongly scented Camomile, a favorite plant of Lord Bacon's day. Wordsworth wrote in jingling rhyme:-- "Beneath these fruit-tree boughs that shed Their snow-white blossoms on my head, With brightest sunshine round me spread Of spring's unclouded weather, In this sequester'd nook how sweet To sit upon my orchard seat; And flowers and birds once more to greet, My last year's friends together."