Annals of our ancestors; one hundred and fifty years of history in the ...

CHAPTER III
CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH OF B. U. WATKINS
HE years came and went, and brought out of
meager beginnings many improvements. Damask
roses clung to the pillars of the porch of the
frame house and filled the air with fragrance.
A large garden with a southern slope was enclosed
by a fence of palings which grandfather
had split from hickory logs. Along this fence
they planted cherry trees — what a high beautiful hedge they
made! By the gate sweet daffodils and narcissus bent their
perfumed heads and artichokes grew. Tall sunflowers flaunted
their heavy crowns of gold within that garden fence, and there
bowered the wonderful Mayduke cherry tree, changing with
the season from fragrant bloom to delicious, juicy fruit. Some
of the visions which had brightened our grandparents' first
hard and barren days had come true; it is good to think that
their labor was not in vain, and that for them the wilderness did
truly blossom as the rose. Wheat-fields waved before the
June breezes; dark, rank corn filled the lowlands with a prospect
delightful to see; the orchard trees were heavy with fruit.
A certain apple tree, it may have been one of Great-grandmother
Badgley's seedlings, bore sixty bushels of apples one
summer, and was thenceforth known as the "sixty-bushel
tree.
Inside the garden palings grandfather built drying kilns,
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