The peach
tree budded, blossomed, and bore its fruit. The swallows and
martins came, twittered about the roof, built their nests, reared
their young, held their congress along the eaves, and then winged
their flight in search of another spring. The caterpillar spun its
winding sheet, dangled in it from the great buttonwood tree before
the house, turned into a moth, fluttered with the last sunshine of
summer, and disappeared; and finally the leaves of the buttonwood
tree turned yellow, then brown, then rustled one by one to the
ground, and whirling about in little eddies of wind and dust,
whispered that winter was at hand.
Wolfert gradually woke from his dream of wealth as the year
declined. He had reared no crop for the supply of his household
during the sterility of winter. The season was long and severe,
and for the first time the family was really straitened in its
comforts. By degrees a revulsion of thought took place in
Wolfert's mind, common to those whose golden dreams have been
disturbed by pinching realities. The idea gradually stole upon him
that he should come to want.
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