Fruit trees would never grow near it,
and this had been a great grief to Sara.
"Oh, daddy, if we could just have an orchard!" she had been wont
to say wistfully, when other farmhouses in White Sands were
smothered whitely in apple bloom. And when she had gone away,
and her father had nothing to look forward to save her return,
he was determined she should find an orchard when she came back.
Over the southward hill, warmly sheltered by spruce woods and
sloping to the sunshine, was a little field, so fertile that all
the slack management of a life-time had not availed to exhaust it.
Here Old Man Shaw set out his orchard and saw it flourish,
watching and tending it until he came to know each tree as a child
and loved it. His neighbours laughed at him, and said that the fruit
of an orchard so far away from the house would all be stolen.
But as yet there was no fruit, and when the time came for bearing
there would be enough and to spare.
"Blossom and me'll get all we want, and the boys can have the rest,
if they want 'em worse'n they want a good conscience,"
said that unworldly, unbusinesslike Old Man Shaw.
On his way back home from his darling orchard he found a rare
fern in the woods and dug it up for Sara--she had loved ferns.
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