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The priest, seated at the bottom of the little garden, his breviary fallen on his lap, remained absorbed in pious thoughts, while all around him rosy petals rained from the blossoming peach-trees. About six o'clock there came a sudden wakening. A noise of doors opening and closing, accompanied by bursts of laughter, shook the whole house.
Now we are in a sweet, sunbright, sheltered valley, where all is verdure and luxuriance. At every door are pink and white oleanders in full bloom, in every garden peach-trees showing their rich, ruby-coloured fruit the handsome-leaved mulberry, the shining olive, with lovely little chestnut-woods on the heights around. Now we seem in a wholly different latitude.
The ancient figs and peach-trees, half buried in the slime, rose up stiffly from the fertile soil beneath; and the Jail Canyon Ranch, once so flamboyantly green, was now shore-lined with a blotch of dirty gray. Only the alfalfa patch remained, and the house on the hill everything else was either washed away or covered with gravel and dirt. And the road it was washed away too.
All the girls in Hill Street were delighted at getting the presents from Aunt Warrington in Virginia and addressed a collective note, which must have astonished that good lady when she received it in spring-time, when she and Mountain and Fanny were on a visit to grim deserted Castlewood, when the snows had cleared away and a thousand peach-trees flushed with blossoms.
It was while thinking what I could do next that I came down the row of young peach-trees and spied the woodchuck out in the orchard, fifty yards away from his hole. He spied me at the same instant, and rose upon his haunches. At last we were face to face. The time had come.
We made alleys, grottoes, cascades; the appearance of the ground had now some life and diversity. We planted willows, oaks, peach-trees, to give a little shade round the house. Having completed the ornamental part of our labours we turned to the useful. We divided the ground, we manured it, and sowed it with abundance of beans, peas, and every vegetable that grows in the island."
In the gardens of the wealthy, we often see peach-trees and pear-trees trained against brick or stone walls, to which they are attached by substantial thongs. These trees are carefully and systematically trained, and they are trained so as to accomplish certain results.
Spring broke on the snug little suburb, and buds and birds fulfilled their appointments on the boughs of willows, ailanthuses, lindens, and maples. Some peach-trees in the back yard of the Zane House hastened to put on their pink scarves and bonnets, and the boys said that an old sucker of Penn's Treaty Elm down in a ship-yard was fresh and blithsome as a second wife.
He told her of the little white cottage in New Jersey, where they had lived, of the peach-trees that bloomed around the house, of the beehive in the garden. He had brooded over the recollection of his lost home so long in silence that now it somehow comforted him to talk about it to this sympathetic listener.
Kate listened eagerly, but she did not sigh. It was all charming to her in the soft spring sunshine, the air a perfume, the birds singing, the blossoms bursting, the peach-trees anthems of praise and best of all her dear Uncle George strolling at her side. And then everything was so clean and fresh and sweet in every nook and corner of the tumble-down house.
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