will you come on down to the spring?" And without waiting for my reply,
Adam started down the hill, crosswise from the path by which I had
ascended, padding ahead in his weird leather sandals and breaking a path
for me through the undergrowth as I followed close at his shoulder, an
order of rough travel to which I had become accustomed in the weeks that
had passed and that now seemed to me--well, I might say racial.

In the riot of an April growing day, in which we could hear life fairly
teem and buzz at our feet, on right, and left, and overhead, Adam and I
worked shoulder to shoulder in the old garden of Elmnest. Every now and
then I ran down to the spring to put a green fagot under the pot of herbs,
which needed to simmer for hours to be as delicious as was possible for
them. From the library came a rattle and bang of literary musketry from the
blessed parental twins, who were for the time being with Julius Cæsar in
"all Gaul," and oblivious to anything in the twentieth century, even a
spring-intoxicated niece and daughter down in her grandmother's garden with
a Pan from the woods; occasionally Rufus rattled a pot or a pan; but save
for these few echoes of civilization, Adam and I delved and spaded and
clipped and pruned and planted in the old garden just as if it had been the
plot of ground without the walls of Eden in which our first parents were
forced to get busy.

"Great work, Farmwoman," said Adam as we sat down on the side steps to eat,
bite-about, the huge red apple he had taken from the bundle of emigrant
appearance which he always carried over his shoulder on the end of a long
hickory stick and which I had by investigation at different times found to
contain everything from clean linen to Sanskrit poetry for father. To-day I
found the manuscript score of a new opera by no less a person than Hurter
himself, which he insisted on having me hum through with him while we ate
the apple.