THE GRANDMOTHER'S SHOE.
among the dewy grass; the rough trunks of the plum, trees all gray with lichen, and blue above with partly ripe fruit, are vividly impressed upon my recollection; as well as the frames on which, in the middle of the day, we sometimes laid our hands to feel how hot the glass was; peeping through at the long cucumbers and plump melons, as they lay basking in the moist heat; or following the gardener when he walked round with his tiles, and laid them carefully under those which he wished to ripen first.
I also remember, as if it had happened but yesterday, how we used to run to meet Lucy's placid father, as he came leisurely down the grass walk, to have his daily colloquy with the gardener; how he gathered and stored the ripe pears from the espaliers, and lifted up the leaves from the wall fruit to see how it was coming on; how he would lament that birds should be such arrant thieves, and turn a deaf ear to the old gardener, when he muttered that there was but one way to cure them of it.
Then I remember the cool fruit-house, into which we sometimes helped him to carry summer apples; and what the gardener called the 'kippen peers;' but above all I remember a certain fine young apricot-tree, a moor-park, in its first year of bearing, and how every day we went to count and admire upon it six beautiful apricots, and no more.
Few things in a garden are more beautiful than ripening apricots; the downy surface, the rich golden color, speckled, as in this sort, with clear red spots, and surrounded by pointed leaves of most glossy green, and broad sunshine that bathed them, the careful training,—
