I don't believe any of you happen to have just the same passion for the blue hyacinth which I have,--very certainly not for the crushed lilac-leaf-buds; many of you do not know how sweet they are. You love the smell of the sweet-fern and the bayberry-leaves, I don't doubt; but I hardly think that the last bewitches you with young memories as it does me. For the same reason I come back to damask roses, after having raised a good many of the rarer varieties. I like to go to operas and concerts, but there are queer little old homely sounds that are better than music to me. However, I suppose it's foolish to tell such things.
----It is pleasant to be foolish at the right time,--said the divinity-student;--saying it, however, in one of the dead languages, which I think are unpopular for summer-reading, and therefore do not bear quotation as such.
Well, now,--said I,--suppose a good, clean, wholesome-looking countryman's cart stops opposite my door.--Do I want any huckleberries?--If I do not, there are those that do. Thereupon my soft-voiced handmaid bears out a large tin pan, and then the wholesome countryman, heaping the peck-measure, spreads his broad hands around its lower arc to confine the wild and frisky berries, and so they run nimbly along the narrowing channel until they tumble rustling down in a black cascade and tinkle on the resounding metal beneath.--I won't say that this rushing huckleberry hail-storm has not more music for me than the "Anvil Chorus."
----I wonder how my great trees are coming on this summer.
----Where are your great trees, Sir? said the divinity-student.
Oh, all round about New England. I call all trees mine that I have put my wedding-ring on, and I have as many tree-wives as Brigham Young has human ones.
----One set's as green as the other,--exclaimed a boarder, who has never been identified.
They're all Bloomers,--said the young fellow called John.
[I should have rebuked this trifling with language, if our landlady's daughter had not asked me just then what I meant by putting my wedding-ring on a tree.]
Why, measuring it with my thirty-foot tape, my dear,--said I.--I have worn a tape almost out on the rough barks of our old New England elms and other big trees.--Don't you want to hear me talk trees a little now? That is one of my specialties.