In the back yard, behind a latticed screen-work, some shrubs and bushes
survived from a garden once luxuriant, but now almost vanished. There had
been a cherry-tree, too--a valiant little grower, which put forth a cloud
of white blossoms late in every May, and filled a small pail with fruit
early in every July. It was thus that Jane was enabled to celebrate her
birthday (which fell about this time of year) with a fair-sized cherry
pie; and in especially favorable seasons enough cherries were left over
to make a small tart for Rosy.
But the atmosphere had years ago become too urban for the poor
cherry-tree, which had long since disappeared from mortal ken; and the
last of the currant-bushes, too, were holding their own but poorly
against the smoke and cinders of metropolitan life. One of Jane's
earliest recollections was that of putting on her flat and taking her tin
pan and accompanying her mother out to pick currants for the annual
jelly-making. Her mother wore a flat, too, and carried a tin pan--both of
proportionate size. The flats had long since been cast aside, and the
pans had become less necessary with the dwindling of the currant-bushes;
but the jelly-making returned with every recurring July. A great many
quarts of alien currants and a great many pounds of white sugar were
fused in that hot and sticky kitchen, and then the red-stained cloths
were hung to dry upon the last remaining bushes. Jane would sometimes
reproach her parent with such a proceeding--which seemed to her hardly
less reprehensible than the seething of a kid in its mother's milk; but
Eliza Marshall had scant receptivity for any such poetical analogies.
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