My trees are young enough, and if they do not take me away into the past, they project me into the future.  When I planted them, I knew I was performing an act, the issues of which would outlast me long.  My oaks are but saplings; but what undreamed-of English kings will they not outlive!  I pluck my apples, my pears, my plums; and I know that from the same branches other hands will pluck apples, pears, and plums when this body of mine will have shrunk into a pinch of dust.  I cannot dream with what year these hands will date their letters.  A man does not plant a tree for himself, he plants it for posterity.  And, sitting idly in the sunshine, I think at times of the unborn people who will, to some small extent, be indebted to me.  Remember me kindly, ye future men and women!  When I am dead, the juice of my apples will foam and spurt in your cider-presses, my plums will gather for you their misty bloom; and that any of your youngsters should be choked by one of my cherry-stones, merciful Heaven forfend!

In this pleasant summer weather I hold my audience in my garden rather than in my house.  In all my interviews the sun is a third party.  Every village has its Fool, and, of course, Dreamthorp is not without one.  Him I get to run my messages for me, and he occasionally turns my garden borders with a neat hand enough.  He and I hold frequent converse, and people here, I have been told, think we have certain points of sympathy.  Although this is not meant for a compliment, I take it for one.  The poor faithful creature’s brain has strange visitors; now ’t is fun, now wisdom, and now something which seems in the queerest way a compound of both.  He lives in a kind of twilight which obscures objects, and his remarks seem to come from another world than that in which ordinary people live.  He is the only original person of my acquaintance; his views of life are his own, and form a singular commentary on those generally accepted.  He is dull enough at times, poor fellow; but anon he startles you with something, and you think he must have wandered out of Shakspeare’s plays into this out-of-the-way place.  Up from the village now and then comes to visit me the tall, gaunt, atrabilious confectioner, who has a hankering after Red-republicanism, and the destruction of Queen, Lords, and Commons.  Guy Fawkes is, I believe, the only martyr in his calendar.  The sourest-tempered man, I think, that ever engaged in the manufacture of sweetmeats.  I wonder that the oddity of the thing never strikes himself.  To be at all consistent, he should put poison in his lozenges, and become the Herod of the village innocents.  One of his many eccentricities is a love for flowers, and he visits me often to have a look at my greenhouse and my borders.  I listen to his truculent and revolutionary speeches, and take my revenge by sending the gloomy egotist away with a nosegay in his hand, and a gay-coloured flower stuck in a button-hole.  He goes quite unconscious of my floral satire.