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Then the sunbeam spoke of the boundless love of God, as seen in creation, and over all that lives, and of the equal distribution of His gifts, both in time and in eternity. "That is your opinion," said the apple-bough.
More than once that morning he drew up by the roadside to listen to some lyrical robin on an apple-bough, or to make friends with the black- belted Durham cows and the cream-colored Alderneys, who came solemnly to the pasture wall and stared at him with big, good-natured faces. A row of them, with their lazy eyes and pink tongues and moist india-rubber noses, was as good as a play.
All the revelation of beauty and sweetness seemed a refinement of torture worse to bear than the sight of death and misery would have been. Every blooming apple-bough seemed to strike her full on the heart. "Only look at that bush of red flowers in that yard," Maria said once, and Ellen looked and was stung by the sight as by the contact of a red flaming torch of spring.
And their long kiss, there in sight of their new home-to-be alone there in that desolated world was as natural as the summer breeze, the liquid melody of the red-breast on the blossomy apple-bough above their heads, the white and purple spikes of odorous lilacs along the vine-grown stone wall, the gold and purple dawn now breaking over the distant reaches of the river.
"See," she exclaimed, "how wonderfully God has made this little flower. I will paint it with the apple-branch together. Every one admires the beauty of the apple-bough; but this humble flower has been endowed by Heaven with another kind of loveliness; and although they differ in appearance, both are the children of the realms of beauty."
Those old ladies who found their fattest goose dangling half-dead from the apple-bough in the early morning, or who looked in vain for patient cows within the yard, whose bars had mysteriously disappeared, began less to admire this youthful metropolitan. Complaints poured in upon Col. Selby. At first he laughed and made light of them; then he consulted his wife.
There is not one Mohawk left on their ancient lands, there is not one seed planted, not one foot of soil cultivated, not one apple-bough grafted, not one fish-line set! "And you tell me the Mohawks are painted for the planting-dance, in black and white? With every hatchet shining like silver, and every knife ground to a razor-edge, and every rifle polished, and every flint new?"
The apple-bough had never thought of the boundless love of God, which extends over all the works of creation, over everything which lives, and moves, and has its being in Him; he had never thought of the good and beautiful which are so often hidden, but can never remain forgotten by Him, not only among the lower creation, but also among men. The sunbeam, the ray of light, knew better.
It is as though in each one the ability to feel beauty has been quickened, that each for an instant becomes the man who has never before seen the spring come over the land, and who, glancing upward, for the first time beholds an apple-bough flowering against the blue. And Scriabine fills one with the need of making wonderful and winged gestures.
"That's so," exclaimed John Jay, "an' shingle say so too," he added, with a grin, for his legs still smarted. Loosening the grip of his knees on the apple-bough, he turned a summersault backward and landed on his feet as lightly as a cat. "Ivy'll go to sleep aftah dinnah," suggested Bud. "She always do."
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