Below, and on both sides of the green-house, the fertile ground was set thick with fruit-trees, our father’s special pride. The pears and peaches of Green Peace were known far and wide; I have never seen such peaches since, nor is it only the halo of childish recollection that shines around them, for others bear the same testimony. Crimson-glowing, golden-hearted, smooth and perfect as a baby’s cheek, each one was a thing of wonder and beauty; and when you ate one, you ate summer and sunshine. Our father gave us a great deal of fruit, but we were never allowed to take it ourselves without permission; indeed, I doubt if it ever occurred to us to do so. One of us still remembers the thrill of horror she felt when a little girl who had come to spend the afternoon picked up a fallen peach and ate it, without asking leave. It seemed a dreadful thing not to know that the garden was a field of honor. As to the proverbial sweetness of stolen fruit, we knew nothing about it. The fruit was sweet enough from our dear father’s hand, and, as I said, he gave us plenty of it. How was it, I wonder, that this sense of honor seemed sometimes to stay in the garden and not always to come into the house? [Illustration: LAURA WAS FOUND IN THE SUGAR-BARREL.] For as I write, the thought comes to me of a day when Laura was found with her feet sticking out of the sugar-barrel, into which she had fallen head foremost while trying to get a lump of sugar. She has never eaten a lump of sugar, save in her tea, since that day. Also, it is recorded of Flossy and Julia, that, being one day at the Institution, they found the store-room open, and went in, against the law. There was a beautiful polished tank, which appeared to be full of rich brown syrup. Julia and Flossy liked syrup; so each filled a mug, and then they counted one, two, three, and each took a good draught,--and it was train-oil! But in both these cases the culprits were hardly out of babyhood; so perhaps they had not yet learned about the “broad stone of honor,” on which it is good to set one’s feet. I must not leave the garden without speaking of the cherry-trees. These must have been planted by early settlers, perhaps by the same hand that planned the crooked stairs and quaint cupboards of the old house,--enormous trees, gnarled and twisted like ancient apple-trees, and as sturdy as they. They had been grafted--whether by our father’s or some earlier hand I know not--with the finest varieties of “white-hearts” and “black-hearts,” and they bore amazing quantities of cherries. These attracted flocks of birds, which our father in vain tried to frighten away with scarecrows. Once he put the cat in a bird-cage, and hung her up in the white-heart tree; but the birds soon found that she could not get at them, and poor pussy was so miserable that she was quickly released.