“I was born over yonder,” Tom told them, pointing his whip at a little house next the white church that occupied the north end of the green. “So was Pa, and his Pa too, but now my Aunt Cynthy Bardwell lives there. She’s got the finest rose garden in Eastport, and all the summer folks come down here to buy her roses. She’s Pa’s only sister, and her husband was a captain too, sailed a schooner up to the Gulf every year for over forty years, and fell off the dock down here one day loading ties.”
“Doing what, Tom?” asked Polly, anxiously, as they stopped.
“Loading railroad ties from the saw mill yonder, to carry south. He was just visiting around the docks and saw a tie slip into the river, and it knocked off a little chap with it, Dicky Button, it was, and Uncle Bardwell went in after him, and just then a boat come along, and her swell swashed the schooner up against the dock, and when they got him out he was dead, but Dicky’s alive.”
The girls listened and made up their minds they wanted to see the rose garden then and there. It was only nine, Polly said, and the train couldn’t possibly get through the village without everybody knowing it was there. So Tom tied the colts to the hitching post, and they went in to call on Mrs. Cynthy Bardwell.
Ruth started to walk up the front path, but Tom told her they had better go around to the back door, so they followed him obediently along the graveled path, bordered neatly with clam shells turned face downward in the mould. Then came “old hen and chickens,” as Kate called them, mignonette, sweet alyssium, marigolds, and pansies. And in the center of each bed there rose up stocks, pink and white, and so fragrant and lovable, that the girls begged for some at once.
“Well, I do declare!” exclaimed a sweet, friendly voice so near to them they nearly jumped. “I’m right here at the buttery window, girls, and I saw you and Tom coming. Wait a minute till I change my apron.”
“It gave me quite a turn to see such a lot of youngsters in my garden so early,” she told them, when she appeared, tying the strings of her apron as she talked. “Come and see my roses.”
It seemed as if nothing but roses grew in that long back garden, shaded with horse chestnut trees, excepting the tall lilac bushes along the fence and the lilies of the valley that grew thickly on the ground beneath them.