holding of the ploughshare, the pulling of weeds, the digging around
the roots of flowers, and the planting of seeds.

Every autumn he seemed about to totter to his fall among the fading
flowers; every spring it was like Death himself urging on the
resurrection; but he lived on year after year, and tended well
Evelina's garden, and the gardens of other maiden-women and widows in
the village. He was taciturn, grubbing among his green beds as
silently as a worm, but now and then he warmed a little under a fire
of questions concerning Evelina's garden. "Never see none sech
flowers in nobody's garden in this town, not sence I knowed 'nough to
tell a pink from a piny," he would mumble. His speech was thick; his
words were all uncouthly slurred; the expression of his whole life
had come more through his old knotted hands of labor than through his
tongue. But he would wipe his forehead with his shirt-sleeve and lean
a second on his spade, and his face would change at the mention of
the garden. Its wealth of bloom illumined his old mind, and the roses
and honeysuckles and pinks seemed for a second to be reflected in his
bleared old eyes.

There had never been in the village such a garden as this of Evelina
Adams's. All the old blooms which had come over the seas with the
early colonists, and started as it were their own colony of flora in
the new country, flourished there. The naturalized pinks and phlox
and hollyhocks and the rest, changed a little in color and fragrance
by the conditions of a new climate and soil, were all in Evelina's
garden, and no one dreamed what they meant to Evelina; and she did
not dream herself, for her heart was always veiled to her own eyes,
like the face of a nun. The roses and pinks, the poppies and
heart's-ease, were to this maiden-woman, who had innocently and