The excitement of our first spring at Twin Fires will probably never be equalled in our lives, though no spring can recur in a garden without its excitements. But about our first spring there was a glorious thrill of the unexpected which, alas! can come but once. To begin with, it was Stella's initiation into rural April, and the feet of the south wind walking up the land brought hourly miracles to her sight. In the second place, everything in the garden was an experiment. The new hotbeds were an experiment. The bulbs and perennials sown the year before were an experiment. The ramblers were an experiment. The fertilizers I put upon the soil (more or less to Mike's disgust) were an experiment. We were learning everything, and after all no rapture is quite like that of learning.

The last snow melted and the ice went out of the brook in March, but cold nasty weather followed for two weeks. We planted a row of Spencers on March 20th, but it was not till the first day of April that we could spade up 200-foot long rows in the vegetable garden and plant early peas, which I inoculated with nitrogen-gathering bacteria while Mike looked on with unconcealed scorn. I tried to explain the growing process of legumes to him, but gave up the task as hopeless.

"Bugs!" he said. "Puttin' bugs in the soil! No good never came o' that. Manure's the thing."

About this time, too, we started the hotbeds, a long row of them on the south side of the kitchen. The fresh manure cost us $2 a load, for, owning but one horse, we did not have enough in our stable; and, as Stella said, the piles "steamed expensively," like small volcanoes, as they stood waiting in the sun after a warm, drenching shower. We were all impatience to start our beds, but Mike kept us waiting till the soil temperature had gone down. Then the sowing began. While Mike was putting in his beds large quantities of cauliflowers, which had proved one of our most profitable crops the year before, and celery and lettuce and tomatoes and peppers and radishes and cabbages, we divided our beds into one-foot squares, and sowed our different colours of antirrhinum, asters, stock, Phlox Drummondi, cosmos, annual larkspur, heliotrope, and Dimorphotheca Aurantiaca, a plant chosen by Stella because she said the name irresistibly appealed to a philologist. Later we agreed that that was about its only appeal.

While the hotbeds were sprouting, demanding their daily water and nightly cover, there was the ploughing to be done, the perennial beds to be uncovered, the new beds by the pool to be made ready, more pruning to be accomplished, and consequently more litter to be removed, birds to be watched for excitedly, and crocus spears in the grass, and, of course, the little lawn beyond the pool to be sowed to grass, and some grass seeds worked into the sundial lawn, which was still thin and patchy.

"Oh, I don't know which is the real sign of spring," said Stella, one evening, as we wandered on the terrace before the south room and heard the shrill chorus of the Hylas from our swamp. "Sometimes I think it's the Hylas, on the first warm evening; sometimes I think it's the fox sparrows who appeared suddenly the other day at 10.01 A.M. while you were working, and began hippity-hopping all over the grass. Sometimes I think it's the soft coot-coot of our new hens in the sun. Sometimes I think it's a crocus leaf. Sometimes I think it's the steaming manure piles. Sometimes it seems to be the figures of Mike and Joe driving old Dobbin and the plough, against the sky and the lone pine, like a Millet painting."

"Lump them," I suggested. "It's all of them combined. In New York it is when the soda fountains have to be extended over the toothbrush counter."

"New York!" sniffed Stella. "There is no such place!"

April flew past us on gauzy wings, and May came, with violets by our brook and in our pasture, and the trilliums we had transplanted the year before burst into bud. Nearly all our perennials had come through the winter, thanks to the sixty-seven days of snow, and the one plant of blue May phlox which had survived its fall planting made us eager for a second trial, the next time in early spring. More sowings of peas went into the ground. The sundial was set out. Hard Cider came to build our pergola, and the clematis vines arrived to grow over it. The grape arbour along the west side of the sundial lawn was also built, of plain chestnut. The perennials were all moved to their permanent places, the beds fertilized and trimmed.

About the first of May, too, I took a tip from Luther Burbank and put early corn into a mixture of leaf mould and fresh manure in a big box. When the time came the middle of the month for the first planting, my seeds had developed snaky white roots and stalks. Again to Mike's disgust, I made a long trench and put these sprouted seeds in thickly. In a couple of days they were up, and by the time his conventionally planted hills had sprouted, I had a long row of well-started corn which I thinned out to the strongest stalks.

"Now, Mike," said I, "I'll beat you and the town in the market."

"Well, bedad, it beats all how you fellers that don't know nothin' about farmin' can do some things," he said, regarding my corn with comical amazement.

"That's because we are willing to learn," said I, and left him still looking at the six-inch high stalks.

(Incidentally, I may remark that I did beat everybody in the market, and made about $15 extra by my simple experiment.)

But Stella's chief joy in the garden was in the surprises of the blooms: in the stately clumps of Darwins against the pillars of the rose aqueduct; in the golden bursts of daffodils here and there where we had sown a few bulbs and forgotten the spot; in the Narcissus poeticus, which were in their element close to the brook and did verily look at themselves in the tiny pool below the dam; in the pale gold ring of the great Empress narcissus bordering the iris spears around the large pool; above all, perhaps, in the maroon of the trilliums which we had brought home from that first wonderful walk in the woods. Not alone her heart, but her feet, danced with the daffodils, and I could hear her of a morning as I worked, out in the garden singing or bringing in great bunches of blooms to decorate the house.

On several afternoons we made further trips to the deep woods after wild-flower plants, and set them in along our brook. The thrush had returned, the apple blossoms had made all the garden fragrant while the plants were budding (this year they were carefully sprayed twice, for, though it cost nearly as much to spray them as the entire value of the apples, one thing I cannot stand on my farm is poor or neglected fruit; besides, the improved aspect of the trees themselves was worth the price). Now that their petals had fallen came the new fragrance, subtler but no less exquisite, of many flowers after May rain, of a spring brook running under pines, and near the house the pungent aroma of lilacs.

Then came the German irises, like soldiers on parade, around the pool, and the bright lemon lilies in the shady dooryard. Scarce had the irises begun to fall when the foxgloves began to blossom, and all suddenly one morning after a very warm night the sundial was surrounded by a stately conclave of slender queens dressed in white and lavender, while more queens marched down from the orchard to the pool, and yet more stood against the shrubbery beyond it, or half hid the bare newness of our grape arbour.

"I don't need to take digitalis internally for a heart stimulant!" cried Stella. "Oh, the lovely things! Quick, vases of them below the Hiroshiges! Quick, your camera! Quick, come and look at them, come and see the bees swinging in their bells!"

"I suppose they are breakfast bells," said I.

"This is no time for bad puns," she answered, dragging me swiftly down through the orchard, and up again to the sundial.

Indeed, the June morning was beautiful, and the foxgloves ringing the white dial post above the fresh green of our lawn had an indescribable air of delicate stateliness in the sun. And they were murmurous with bees. Again and again that morning I looked up from my work and saw them there, in the focussed sunlight, saw my wife hovering over them, saw beyond them, through the rose arches, Mike and Joe at work on the farm, saw still farther away the procession of my pines, and then the far hills and the blue sky. Again, at quiet evening, when a white-throated sparrow and an oriole were competing in song, we watched the foxgloves turn to white ghosts glimmering in the dusk, we heard the bird songs die away, the shrill of night insects arise, and then the tinkle of our brook came into consciousness, as it ran ever riverward in the night.

"The spring melts into summer," said Stella, "as gently as the little brook runs toward the sea. I wish it would linger, though. Oh, John, couldn't we build a dam and hold back the spring? A little pool of spring forever in our garden?"

"We shall have to make that pool within our hearts," said I.