full of swollen buds: but it is a process that I can never help watching. Many an hour have I spent in seeing the bark removed, and set up in rows in the woods, and in helping to make larch poles, or faggots from the small boughs of the oaks. I would fain have stepped up to the wood now, to see what was doing; but we were really so hungry that breakfast was more important than the most picturesque group in the fleckered sunshine of the wood.
Just in the climax of our hunger, near our own door, we met our carpenter, who is a great lover of sport, with a basket which we knew so well that we guessed at once what was in it—fish of some kind.
“Eels, most likely,” Jane thought. My hope was that it might be tench or perch; but it was something better—even trout! Here was the first offer of trout this season, and I could not reject it. I should soon be providing our table with trout once a day, at least, Sundays excepted; but I had not thought of beginning yet; and the boys would be jealous if I did not keep the freshness of the year’s sport for them in their Whitsuntide holidays. So we would condescend to eat trout of other folks’ catching at present; and the carpenter was sent on to order a dish of his speckled prey to be got ready for our May-day breakfast.
It was a luxurious breakfast certainly—the sunshine and still air justifying our sitting with the glass-door open to the garden. The laburnum on one side cast its small waving shadows on the carpet, and the rich scent of the lilacs floated in. The white globes of the Guelder-rose hung over the grass; and the great wild-cherry on the green slope looked as if it had been powdered over with blossom. A bright golden line under the garden wall, and golden patches about the rockery, showed that the punctual yellow poppies were in full blow. The pale pæony made a good contrast with them, and the deep-coloured one would soon make a better.
The little thicket of rhododendrons, intermixed in front with graceful azaleas, pink and maize coloured, would be the grand show of the garden through the month: but we were just as fond of some old friends among the flowers with whom we had been intimate before our grand new acquaintances, from east, west, and south, had condescended to make themselves at home in middle-class gardens. We hailed the first honeysuckle which nodded to us from the porch the other day, just as heartily as if we had not beautiful climbers from the whole range between California and Japan, running a race up to my chimney-tops. Nobody can be more thankful than we are for the treasures which have been brought to England from all the gardens of the world; but, if they were all to die off in one night, I could be still content with our great honeysuckle on the porch, and with the mingled scent which is, to my sense, unmatched—that of the brier-rose and clematis growing close together. We have not got them yet: but we shall see some of our climbing roses shining forth from the ivy before the month is up. Meantime, we have still plenty of wall-flowers: and the stock gillyflowers, and star of Bethlehem, and star of Jerusalem, and Solomon’s seal, and bachelor’s button, and yellow lily, and monkshood, with some remaining tulips, and an early poppy or two, will carry us on till the full rose season. Our lily-of-the-valley is always spoken of by us apart from the crowd of common flowers. We have a shady place for it—a bed of leaves in a moist nook, where it flourishes as finely as in its own islet in the river: and some morning soon, I doubt not, I shall find beside my plate at breakfast a half-blown spike lying within its pair of cool leaves, and just sending forth its first faint perfume.
Our breakfast—trout, eggs, early grass butter, thick cream, radishes, flowers with their buzzing bees and stealing fragrance—must come to an end at last. But the morning was not like ordinary mornings. We could not feel it to be a common working-day. In the afternoon we would have a long stroll. During the morning there was a good deal of basking on the lawn, loitering in the orchard to admire the last of the blossoming, and watch how the fruit was setting, and close up any loose clay about the grafts, and make war against a host of insects.
Little Harry must have his Mayday early, as he could not join in our long walks. It was an old promise that he should have a cowslip ball when the season came round. The cook had hinted at cowslip-wine, and the nursemaid at cowslip-tea. I forbade the wine, and consigned the tea project to those who might like to drink it; but the hall was unexceptionable. Mamma and Bell went down into the meadows with the child, and Jane and I saw no more of them for some hours.
They had been well entertained. They had seen the water-meadows irrigated for the first time this season; the sluice opened at the top of the gentle ascent, and the little streams glistening in their tiny channels, as they flowed down to the drain below.
They saw the Squire’s bailiff measuring and marking, with his assistants, at different places between the higher and the lower grounds. There was to be more draining, and more irrigating; and the appearance of the natural springs, showing themselves after the rains in winter, had been carefully noted, in order to utilise them in the new works.
Harry seldom had one indulgence without its leading to another. He came home full of mamma’s promise that, when the glow-worms came, which would be within this month, he should sit up late, to go and see them in the lanes. We were to hear the nightingale on the same occasion, if possible. Harry might also see a bat, and feel a cockchafer knock against his face; and perhaps catch under a tumbler some of the beautiful moths which were already beginning to find their way in at night, and whirl and hover round the lamp. What living creature is there more beautiful than some of those moths, of whose life the main idea seems to be burning themselves to death!
Jane and I got out the telescope, for its service of the year,—its use on every fine day till the days should be too short and dim. By it we overlook the hill range as if we lived upon it. This was just the day for finding out what had