Even This Was Not Enough To Make Me Face The Awful Sight Of Margarita Dead; The Very Thought Of It Was An Intolerable Weight On My Heart; But It Was Not Grief That Gave Me This Sensation, Much As I Grieved; It Was Solely My Fear Of Death.

CHAPTER IV

THE PLANTATION

Living with trees - Winter violets - The house is made habitable - Red willow - Scissor-tail and carrion-hawk - Lombardy poplars-Black acacia - Other trees - The foss or moat - Rats - A trial of strength with an armadillo - Opossums living with a snake - Alfalfa field and butterflies - Cane brake - -Weeds and fennel - Peach trees in blossom - Paroquets - Singing of a field finch - Concert-singing in birds - Old John - Cow- birds' singing - Arrival of summer migrants.

I remember - better than any orchard, grove, or wood I have ever entered or seen, do I remember that shady oasis of trees at my new home on the illimitable grassy plain. Up till now I had never lived with trees excepting those twenty-five I have told about and that other one which was called _el arbol_ because it was the only tree of its kind in all the land. Here there were hundreds, thousands of trees, and to my childish unaccustomed eyes it was like a great unexplored forest. There were no pines, firs, nor eucalyptus (unknown in the country then), nor evergreens of any kind; the trees being all deciduous were leafless now in mid-winter, but even so it was to me a wonderful experience to be among them, to feel and smell their rough moist bark stained green with moss, and to look up at the blue sky through the network of interlacing twigs. And spring with foliage and blossom would be with us by and by, in a month or two; even now in midwinter there was a foretaste of it, and it came to us first as a delicious fragrance in the air at one spot beside a row of old Lombardy poplars - an odour that to the child is like wine that maketh the heart glad to the adult. Here at the roots of the poplars there was a bed or carpet of round leaves which we knew well, and putting the clusters apart with our hands, lo! there were the violets already open - the dim, purple-blue, hidden violets, the earliest, sweetest, of all flowers the most loved by children in that land, and doubtless in many other lands.

There was more than time enough for us small children to feast on violets and run wild in our forest; since for several weeks we were encouraged to live out of doors as far away as we could keep from the house where we were not wanted. For just then great alterations were being made to render it habitable: new rooms were being added on to the old building, wooden flooring laid over the old bricks and tiles, and the half-rotten thatch, a haunt of rats and the home of centipedes and of many other hybernating creeping things, was being stripped off to be replaced by a clean healthy wooden roof.

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