“Mother has some this winter, too.  I’ll ask her for them after she’s through forcing them.”

“I like them in the garden, too—­tulips and hyacinths and daffodils and narcissus and, jonquils.  They come so early and give you a feeling that spring really has arrived.”

“You look as if spring had really arrived in the house here.  If there wasn’t a little bit of that snow man left in front I shouldn’t know it had snowed last week.  How in the world did you get all these shrubs to blossom now?  They don’t seem to realize that it’s only January.”

“That’s another thing that’s happened since my birthday.  Margaret told us about bringing branches of the spring shrubs into the house and making them come out in water, so we’ve been trying it.  She sent over those yellow bells, the Forsythia, and Roger brought in the pussy willows from the brook on the way to Mr. Emerson’s.”

“This thorny red affair is the Japan quince, but I don’t recognize these others.”

“That’s because you’re a city girl!  You’ll laugh when I tell you what they are.”

“They don’t look like flowering shrubs to me.”

“They aren’t.  They’re flowering trees; fruit trees!”

“O-o!  That really is a peach blossom, then!”

“The deep pink is peach, and the delicate pink is apple and the white is plum.”

“They’re perfectly dear.  Tell me how you coaxed them out.  Surely you didn’t just keep them in water in this room?”

“We put them in the sunniest window we had, not too near the glass, because it wouldn’t do for them to run any chance of getting chilled.  They stayed there as long as the sun did, and then we moved them to another warm spot and we were very careful about them at night.”

“How often do you change the water?”

“Every two or three days; and once in a while we spray them to keep the upper part fresh—­and there you are.  It’s fun to watch them come out.  Don’t want to take some switches back to town with you?”

Della did.

“They make me think of a scheme that my Aunt Rose is putting into operation.  She went round the world year before last,” she said, “and she saw in Japan lots of plants growing in earthenware vases hanging against the wall or in a long bamboo cut so that small water bottles might be slipped in.  She has some of the very prettiest wall decorations now—­a queer looking greeny-brown pottery vase has two or three sprigs of English ivy.  Another with orange tints has nasturtiums and another tradescantia.”

“Are they growing in water?”

“The ivy and the tradescantia are, but the nasturtiums and a perfectly darling morning glory have earth.  She’s growing bulbs in them, too, only she doesn’t use plain water or earth, just bulb fibre.”

“What’s that?”

“Why, bulbs are such fat creatures that they don’t need the outside food they would get from earth; all they want is plenty of water.  This fibre stuff holds enough water to keep them damp all the time, and it isn’t messy in the house like dirt.”