If the pergola itself is built during the summer, you can sit under it, and by going over your list and colour scheme locate each rose finally before its arrival. By the way, until the climbers are well started you may safely alternate them with vines of the white panicled clematis, that will be in bloom in August and can be easily kept from clutching its rose neighbours!

By and by, when you have planted your roses, tucked them in their winter covers, and can sit down with a calm mind, I will lend you three precious rose books of mine. These are Dean Hole's Book about Roses, for both the wit and wisdom o't; The Amateur Gardener's Rose Book, rescued from the German by John Weathers, F.R.H.S., for its common sense, well-arranged list of roses, and beautiful coloured plates, and H.B. Ellwanger's little treatise on The Rose, a competent chronology of the flower queen up to 1901, written concisely and from the American standpoint. If I should send them now, you would be so bewildered by the enumeration of varieties, many unsuited to this climate, intoxicated by the descriptions of Rose-garden possibilities, and carried away by the literary and horticultural enthusiasm of the one-time master of the Deanery Garden, Rochester, that, like the child turned loose in the toy shop, you would lose the power of choosing.

Lavinia Cortright lost nearly a year in beginning her rosary, owing to a similar condition of mind, and Evan and I long ago decided that when we read we cannot work, and vice versa, so when the Garden of Outdoors is abed and asleep each year, we enter the Garden of Books with fresh delight.

Have you a man with quick wit and a straight eye to be the spade hand during the Garden Vacation? If not, make haste to find him, for, as you have had Barney for five years, he is probably too set in his ways to work at innovations cheerfully!



VIII

A MIDNIGHT ADVENTURE

(Mary Penrose to Barbara Campbell)

June 21. The rosary has been duly surveyed, staked according to the plan, and the border lines fixed with the garden line dipped in whitewash, so that if we only plant a bed at a time, our ambition will always be before us. But as yet no man cometh to dig. This process is of greater import than it may seem, because with the vigorous three-year-old sod thus obtained do we purpose to turf the edges of the beds for hardy and summer flowers that border the squares of the vegetable garden. These strips now crumble earth into the walks, and the slightest footfall is followed by a landslide. We had intended to use narrow boards for edging, but Bart objects, like the old retainer in Kipling's story of An Habitation Enforced, on the ground that they will deteriorate from the beginning and have to be renewed every few years, whereas the turf will improve, even if it is more trouble to care for.

At present the necessity of permanence is one of the things that is impressing us both, for after us—the Infant! Until a year ago I had a positive dread of being so firmly fixed anywhere that to spread wings and fly here and there would be difficult, but now it seems the most delightful thing to be rooted like the old apple tree on the side hill, the last of the old orchard, that has leaned against the upland winds so many years that it is well-nigh bent double, yet the root anchors hold and it is still a thing of beauty, like rosy-cheeked old folk with snowy hair. I do not think that I ever realized this in its fulness until I left the house and came out, though but a short way, to live with and in it all.

You were right in thinking that Barney would not encourage innovations,—he does not! He says that turf lifted in summer always lies uneasy and breeds worms.

This seems to be an age for the defiance of horticultural tradition, for we are finding out every day that you can "lift" almost anything of herbaceous growth at any time and make it live, if you are willing to take pains enough, though of course transplanting is done with less trouble and risk at the prescribed seasons.

The man-with-the-shovel question is quite a serious one hereabouts at present, for the Water Company has engaged all the rough-and-ready labourers for a long season and that has raised both the prices and the noses of the wandering accommodators in the air. Something will probably turn up. Now we are transplanting hardy ferns; for though the tender tops break, there is yet plenty of time for a second growth and rooting before winter.



Meanwhile there is a leisurely old carpenter who recently turned up as heir of the Opal Farm, Amos Opie by name, who is thinking of living there, and has signified his willingness to undertake the pergola by hour's work, "if he is not hustled," as soon as the posts arrive.

The past ten days have been full of marvellous discoveries for the "peculiar Penroses," as Maria Maxwell heard us called down at the Golf Club, where she represented me at the mid-June tea, which I had wholly forgotten that I had promised to manage when I sent out those P.P.C. cards and stopped the clocks!

It seems that the first impression was that financial disaster had overtaken us, when instead of vanishing in a touring car preceded by tooting and followed by a cloud of oil-soaked steam, we took to our own woods, followed by Barney with our effects in a wheelbarrow. It is a very curious fact—this attributing of every action a bit out of the common to the stress of pocket hunger. It certainly proves that advanced as we are supposed to be to-day as links in the evolutionary chain, we have partially relapsed and certainly show strong evidences of sheep ancestry.

Haven't you noticed, Mrs. Evan, how seldom people are content to accept one's individual tastes or desire to do a thing without a good and sufficient reason therefor? It seems incomprehensible to them that any one should wish to do differently from his neighbour unless from financial incapacity; the frequency with which one is suspected of being in this condition strongly points to the likelihood that the critics themselves chronically live beyond their means and in constant danger of collapse.

If this was thought of us a few weeks ago, it seems to have been sidetracked by Maria Maxwell's contribution to, and management of, the golf tea. She is said not only to have compounded viands that are ordinarily sold in exchange for many dollars by New York confectioners, but she certainly made more than a presentable appearance as "matron" of the receiving committee of young girls. Certainly Maria with a music roll, a plain dark suit, every hair tethered fast, and common-sense shoes, plodding about her vocation in snow and mud, and Maria "let loose," as Bart calls it, are a decided contrast. Except that she has not parted with her sunny common-sense, she is quite a new person. Of course I could not have objected to it, but I was afraid that she might take it into her head to instruct the Infant in vocal music after the manner of the locustlike sounds that you hear coming over the lowered tops of school windows as soon as the weather grows warm, or else take to practising scales herself, for we had only known the technical part of her calling. In short, we feared that we should be do-re-mi-ou'd past endurance. Instead of which, scraps of the gayest of ballads float over the knoll in the evening, and the Infant's little shrill pipe is being inoculated with real music, via Mother Goose melodies sung in a delightfully subdued contralto.

From the third day after her arrival people began to call upon Maria. I made such a positive declaration of surrender of all matters pertaining to the household, including curiosity, when Maria took charge,—and she in return promised that we should not be bothered with anything not "of vital importance to our interests,"—that, unless she runs through the housekeeping money before the time, I haven't a ghost of an excuse for asking questions,—but I do wonder how she manages! Also, to whom the shadows belong that cross the south piazza at night or intercept the rays of the dining-room lamp, our home beacon of dark nights.

In addition to the usual and convenient modern shirt-waist-and-skirt endowment, Maria had when she came but two gowns, one of black muslin and the other white, with improvised hats to match,—simple, graceful gowns, yet oversombre.

But lo! she has blossomed forth like a spring seed catalogue, and Bart insists that I watched the gate with his field-glass an hour the afternoon of the tea, to see her go out. I did no such thing; I was looking at an oriole's nest that hangs in the elm over the road, but I could not help seeing the lovely pink flower hat that she wore atilt, with just enough pink at the neck and streamers at the waist of her dress to harmonize.

I visited the larder that evening for supper supplies,—yes, we have become so addicted to the freedom of outdoors that for the last few days Bart has brought even the dinner up to camp, waiting upon me beautifully, for now we have entirely outgrown the feeling of the first few days that we were taking part in a comedy, and have found ourselves, as it were—in some ways, I think, for the first time.

Anastasia seemed consumed with a desire for a dish of gossip, but was not willing to take the initiative. She chuckled to herself and tried several perfectly transparent ways of attracting my attention, until I took pity on her, a very one-sided pity too, for, between ourselves, Anastasia is the domestic salt and pepper that gives the Garden Vacation a flavour that I should sadly miss.

"Miss Marie," she exclaimed, "do be the tastiest creaytur ever I set me eyes on." (She refused absolutely to call her Maria; that name, she holds, is only fit for a settled old maid, "and that same it's not sure and fair to mark any woman wid being this side the grave.")

Then I knew that I only had to sit down and raise my eyes to Anastasia's face in an attitude of attention, to open the word gates, and this I did.

"Well, fust off win she got the invite ter sing at the swarry that tops off the day's doings down to that Golf Club, she was that worried about hats you never seen the like! She wus over ter Bridgeton, and Barney swore he drove her ter every milliner in the place, and says she ter me, pleasant like, that evenin', when returned, in excuse fer havin' nothin' to show, 'Oh, Annie, Annie, it would break yer heart to see the little whisp of flowers they ask five dollars for; to fix me hats a trifle would part me from a tin-dollar bill!'"

(The sentiments I at once perceived might be Maria's, but their translation Anastasia's.)

"Now Miss Marie, she's savin' like,—not through meanness, but because she's got the good Irish heart that boils against payin' rint, and she's hoardin' crown by shillin' till she kin buy her a cabin and to say a pertaty patch for a garden, somewhere out where it's green! Faith! but she'll do it too; she's a manager! Yez had orter see the illigant boned turkey she made out o' veal, stuck through with shrivelled black ground apples, she called 'puffles'! an glued it up foine wid jelly. Sez I, 'They'll never know the difference,' but off she goes and lets it out and tells the makin' uv it ter every woman on the hill,—that's all I hev agin her. She's got a disease o' truth-telling when there's no need that would anguish the saints o' Hiven theirselves!

"'I kin make better 'n naturaler-lookin' hats fer nothin', here at home, than they keep in N' York,' she says after looking out the back window a piece. 'And who'll help yer?' says I, 'and where'll yer git the posies and what all?'

"'I bought some bolts o' ribbon to-day,' says she, smilin'; 'and fer the rest, the garden, you, and I will manage it together, if you'll lend me a shelf all to meself in the cold closet whenever I need it!' Sure fer a moment I wuz oneasy, fer I thought a wild streak run branchin' through all the boss's family!"

(At the words Garden, You, and I, there flashed through me the thought of some telepathic influence at work.)

"'The garden's full o' growin' posies that outshames the flower-makers; watch out and see, Anastasia!'

"Well and I did!! This mornin' early she picks a lot o' them sticky pink flowers by the stoop, the colour o' chiny shells, wid spokes in them like umbrellas, and the thick green leaves, and after leavin' 'em in water a spell, puts 'em in me cold closet, a small bit o' wet moss tied to each stem end wid green sewin' silk! A piece after dinner out she comes wid the hat that's covered with strong white lace, and she cocks it this way and pinches it that and sews the flowers to it quick wid a big thread and a great splashin' bow on behind, and into the cold box agin!

"'That's fer this afternoon,' says she, and before she wore it off (a hat that Eve, mother o' sin, and us all would envy), she'd another ready for the night! 'Will it spoil now and give yer away, I wonder?' says I, anxious like.

"'Not fer two hours, at least; and it'll keep me from stayin' too long; if I do, it'll wither away and leave me all forlorn, like Cinderella and her pumpkin coach!' she said a-smilin' kind uv to herself in me kitchen mirror, when she put the hat on. 'But I'm not insultin' God's flowers tryin' to pass them off for French ones, Annie,' says she. 'I'm settin' a new garden fashion; let them follow who will!' and away wid her! That same other is in here now, and it's no sin to let yer peep, gin it's ye own posies and ye chest they're in." So, throwing open the door Anastasia revealed the slate shelf covered by a sheet of white paper, while resting on an empty pickle jar, for a support, was the second hat, of loosely woven black straw braid, an ornamental wire edging the brim that would allow it to take a dozen shapes at will. It was garlanded by a close-set wreath of crimson peonies grading down to blush, all in half bud except one full-blown beauty high in front and one under the brim set well against the hair, while covering the wire, caught firm and close, were glossy, fragrant leaves of the wild sweetbrier made into a vine.

Ah, well, this is an unexpected development born of our experiment and a human sort of chronicle for The Garden, You, and I.

One of the most puzzling things in this living out-of-doors on our own place is the reversal of our ordinary viewpoints. Never before did I realize how we look at the outdoor world from inside the house, where inanimate things force themselves into comparison. Now we are seeing from outside and looking in at ourselves, so to speak, very much like the robin, who has his third nest, lop-sided disaster having overtaken the other two, in the old white lilac tree over my window.

Some of our doings, judged from the vantage point of the knoll, are very inconsistent. The spot occupied by the drying yard is the most suitable place for the new strawberry bed, and is in a direct line between the fence gap, where my fragrant things are to be, and the Rose Garden. Several of the walks that have been laid out according to the plan, when seen from this height, curve around nothing and reach nowhere. We shall presently satisfy their empty embraces with shrubs and locate various other conspicuous objects at the terminals.

Also, the house is kept too much shut up; it looks inhospitable, seen through the trees, with branches always tossing wide to the breeze and sun. Even if a room is unoccupied by people, it is no reason why the sun should be barred out, and at best we ourselves surely spend too much time in our houses in the season when every tree is a roof. We have decided not to move indoors again this summer, but to lodge here in the time between vacations and to annex the Infant.

Oh, Mrs. Evan, dear! there is one thing in which The Man from Everywhere reckoned without his host! Stopping the clocks when we went in camp did not dislodge Time from the premises; rather did it open the door to his entrance hours earlier than usual, when one of the chiefest luxuries we promised ourselves was late sleeping.

Stretched on our wire-springed, downy cots (there is positively no virtue in sleeping on hard beds, and Bart considers it an absolute vice), there is a delicious period before sleep comes. Bats flit about the rafters, and an occasional swallow twitters and shifts among the beams as the particular nest it guarded grew high and difficult to mount from the growth of the lusty brood within. The scuffle of little feet over the rough floor brings indolent, half-indifferent guessing as to which of the lesser four-foots they belonged. The whippoorwills down in the river woods call until they drop off, one by one, and the timid ditty of a singing mouse that lives under the floor by my cot is the last message the sandman sends to close our eyes before sleep. And such sleep! That first steel-blue starlit night in the open we said that we meant to sleep and sleep it out, even if we lost a whole day by it. It seemed but a moment after sleep had claimed us, when, struggling through the heavy darkness, came far-away light strands groping for our eyes, and soft, half-uttered music questioning the ear. Returning I opened my eyes, and there was the sun struggling slowly through the screen of white birches in Opie's wood lot, and scattering the night mists that bound down the Opal Farm with heavy strands; the air was tense with flitting wings, bird music rose, fell, and drifted with the mist, and it was only half-past four! You cannot kill time, you see, by stopping clocks—with nature day Is, beyond all dispute. In two days, by obeying instead of opposing natural sun time, we had swung half round the clock, only now and then imitating the habits of our four-footed brothers that steal abroad in the security of twilight.



June 24. Amos Opie, the carpenter, owner of Opal Farm, is now keeping widower's hall in the summer kitchen thereof. A thin thread of smoke comes idly from the chimney of the lean-to in the early morning, and at evening the old man sits in the well-house porch reading his paper so long as the light lasts, a hound of the ancient blue-spotted variety, with heavy black and tan markings, keeping him company.

These two figures give the finishing touch to the picture that lies beyond us as we look from the sheltered corner of the camp, and strangely enough, though old Opie is not of the direct line and has never lived in this part of New England before, he goes about with a sort of half-reminiscent air, as if picking up a clew long lost, while Dave, the hound, at once assumed proprietary rights and shows an uncanny wisdom about the well-nigh fenceless boundaries. After his master has gone to bed, Dave will often come over to visit us, after the calm fashion of a neighbour who esteems it a duty. At least that was his attitude at first; but after a while, when I had told him what a fine, melancholy face he had, that it was a mistake not to have christened him Hamlet, and that altogether he was a good fellow, following up the conversation with a comforting plate of meat scraps (Opie being evidently a vegetarian), Dave began to develop a more youthful disposition. A week ago Bart's long-promised, red setter pup arrived, a spirit of mischief on four clumsy legs. Hardly had I taken him from his box (I wished to be the one to "first foot" him from captivity into the family, for that is a courtesy a dog never forgets) when we saw that Dave was sitting just outside the doorless threshold watching solemnly.

The puppy, with a gleeful bark, licked the veteran on the nose, whereat the expression of his face changed from one of uncertainty to a smile of indulgent if mature pleasure, and now he takes his young friend on a daily ramble down the pasture through the bit of marshy ground to the river, always bringing him back within a reasonable length of time, with an air of pride. Evidently the hound was lonely.

The Man from Everywhere, who prowls about even more than usual, using Bart's den for his own meanwhile, says that the setter will be ruined, for the hound will be sure to trail him on fox and rabbit, and that in consequence he will never after keep true to birds, but somehow we do not care, this dog-friendship between the stranger and the pup is so interesting.

By the way, we have financially persuaded Opie to leave his straggling meadow, that carpets our vista to the river, for a wild garden this summer, instead of selling it as "standing grass," which the purchasers had usually mown carelessly and tossed into poor-grade hay, giving a pittance in exchange that went for taxes.

So many flowers and vines have sprung up under shelter of the tumble-down fences that I was very anxious to see what pictures would paint themselves if the canvas, colour, and brushes were left free for the season through. Already we have had our money's worth, so that everything beyond will be an extra dividend. The bit of marshy ground has been for weeks a lake of iris, its curving brink foamed with meadow rue and Osmundas that have all the dignity of palms.

Now all the pasture edge is set with wild roses and wax-white blueberry flowers. Sundrops are grouped here and there, with yellow thistles; the native sweetbrier arches over gray boulders that are tumbled together like the relic of some old dwelling; and the purple red calopogon of the orchid tribe adds a new colour to the tapestry, the cross-stitch filling being all of field daisies. Truly this old farm is a well-nigh perfect wild garden, the strawberries dyeing the undergrass red, and the hedges bound together with grape-vines. It does not need rescuing, but letting alone, to be the delight of every one who wishes to enjoy.

On being approached as to his future plans, Amos Opie merely sets his lips, brings his finger-tips together, and says, "I'm open to offers, but I'm not bound to set a price or hurry my decisions."

Meanwhile I am living in a double tremor, of delight at the present and fear lest some one may snap up the place and give us what the comic paper called a Queen Mary Anne cottage and a stiff lawn surrounded by a gas-pipe fence to gaze upon. O for a pair of neighbours who would join us in comfortable vagabondage, leave the white birches to frame the meadows and the wild flowers in the grass!

June 25. We have been having some astonishing thunder-storms of nights lately, and I must say that upon one occasion I fled to the house. Two nights ago, however, the sun set in an even sky of lead, there was no wind, no grumblings of thunder. We had passed a very active day and finished placing the stakes on the knoll in the locations to be occupied by shrubs and trees, all numbered according to the tagged specimens over in the reservoir woods.

The Man from Everywhere suggested this system, an adaptation, he says, from the usual one of numbering stones for a bit of masonry. It will prevent confusion, for the perspective will be different when the leaves have fallen, and as we lift the bushes, each one will go to its place, and we shall not lose a year's growth, or perhaps the shrub itself, by a second moving. Our one serious handicap is the lack of a pair of extra hands, in this work as in the making of the rose bed, for our transplanting has developed upon a wholesale plan. Barney does not approve of our passion for the wild; besides, between potatoes and corn to hoe, celery seedlings to have their first transplanting, vegetables to pick, turf grass to mow, and edges to keep trim, with a horse and cow to tend in addition, nothing more can be expected of him.

I was half dozing, half listening, as usual, to the various little night sounds that constantly pique my curiosity, for no matter how long you may have lived in the country you are not wholly in touch with it until you have slept at least a few nights in the open,—when rain began to fall softly, an even, persevering, growing rain, entirely different from the lashing thunder-showers, and though making but half the fuss, was doubly penetrating. Thinking how good it was for the ferns, and venturing remarks to Bart about them, which, however, fell on sleep-deaf ears, I made sure that the pup was in his chosen place by my cot and drifted away to shadow land, glad that something more substantial than boughs covered me!

I do not know how long it was before I wakened, but the first sound that formulated itself was the baying of Dave, the hound, from the well-house porch, where he slept when his evening rambles kept him out until after Amos Opie had gone to bed. Having freed his mind, Dave presently stopped, but other nearer-by sounds made me again on the alert.

The rain, that was falling with increasing power, held one key; the drip from the eaves and the irregular gush from a broken waterspout played separate tunes. I am well used to the night-time bravado of mice, who fight duels and sometimes pull shoes about, of the pranks of squirrels and other little wood beasts about the floor, but the noise that made me sit up in the cot and reach over until I could clutch Bart by the arm belonged to neither of these. There was a swishing sound, as of water being wrung from something and dropping on the floor, and then a human exclamation, blended of a sigh, a wheeze, and a cough, at which the pup wakened with a growl entirely out of proportion to his age and inexperience.

"I wonder, now, is that a dog or only uts growl ter sind me back in the wet fer luv av the laugh at me?" chirped a voice as hoarse as a buttery brogue would allow it to be.

My clutch had brought Bart to himself instantly, and at the words he turned the electric flashlight, that lodged under his pillow, full in the direction of the sound, where it developed a strange picture and printed it clearly on the opposite wall.

In the middle of the circle of light was a little barefoot man, in trousers and shirt; a pair of sodden shoes lay at different angles where they had been kicked off, probably making the sound that had wakened me, and at the moment of the flash he was occupied in the wringing out of a coat that seemed strangely long for the short frame upon which it had hung. The face turned toward us was unmistakably Irish, comical even, entirely unalarming, and with the expression, blended of terror and doubt, that it now wore, he might have slipped from the pages of a volume of Lever that lay face down on the table. The nose turned up at the tip, as if asking questions of the eyes, that hid themselves between the half-shut lids in order to avoid answering. The skin was tanned, and yet you had a certain conviction that minus the tan the man would be very pale, while the iron-gray hair that topped the head crept down to form small mutton-chop whiskers and an Old Country throat thatch that was barely half an inch long.

Bart touched me to caution silence, and I, seeing at once that there was nothing to fear, waited developments.

As soon as he could keep his eyes open against the sudden glare, the little man tried to grasp the column of light in his fingers, then darted out of it, and I thought he had bolted from the barn; but no, he was instantly back again, and dilapidated as he was, he did not look like a professional tramp.

"No, yez don't fool Larry McManus agin! Yez are a mane, cold light with all yer blinkin', and no fire beneath to give 'im the good uv a cup o' tay or put a warm heart in 'im! Two nights agone 'twas suspicion o' rats kep' me from shlapin', yesternight 'twas thought o' what wud become of poor Oireland (Mary rest her) had we schnakes there ter fill the drames o' nights loike they do here whin a man's a drap o'er full o' comfort. 'Tis a good roof above! Heth, thin, had I a whisp o' straw and a bite, wid this moonlight fer company, I'd not shog from out this the night to be King!

"Saints! but there's a dog beyant the bark!" he cried a minute after, as the pup crept over to him and began to be friendly,—"I wonder is a mon sinsible to go to trustin' the loight o' any moon that shines full on a pitch-black noight whin 'tis rainin'? Och hone! but me stomach's that empty, gin I don't put on me shoes me lungs'll lake trou the soles o' me fate, and gin I do, me shoes they're that sopped, I'll cough them up—o-whurra-r-a! whurra-a! but will I iver see Old Oireland agin,—I don't know!"

Bart shut off the light, slipped on his shoes, and drawing a coat over his pajamas lighted the oil stable lantern, hung it with its back toward me, on a long hook that reached down from one of the rafters, and bore down upon Larry, whose face was instantly wreathed in puckered smiles at the sight of a fellow-human who, though big, evidently had no intention of being aggressive.

"Well, Larry McManus," said Bart, cheerfully, "how came you in this barn so far away from Oireland a night like this?"

"Seein' as yer another gintleman o' the road in the same ploice, what more loike than the misfortune's the same?" replied he, lengthening his lower lip and stretching his stubby chin, which he scratched cautiously. Then, as he raised his eyes to Bart's, he evidently read something in his general air, touselled and tanned as he was, that shifted his opinion at least one notch.

"Maybe, sor, you're an actor mon, sor, that didn't suit the folks in the town beyant, sor, but I'd take it as praise, so I would, for shure they're but pigs there,—I couldn't stop wid thim meself! Thin agin, mayhap yer jest a plain gintleman, a bit belated, as it were,—a little belated on the way home, sor,—loike me, sor, that wus moinded to be in Kildare, sor, come May-day, and blessed Peter's day's nigh come about an' I'm here yit!"

"You are getting on the right scent, Larry," said Bart, struggling with laughter, and yet, as he said after, not wishing possibly to huff this curious person. "I hope I'm a gentleman, but I'm not tramping about; this is my barn, in which my wife and I are sleeping, so if I were you, I wouldn't take off that shirt until I can find you a dry one!"

The change that came over the man was comical. In a lightning flash he had fastened the few buttons in his blouse that it had taken his fumbling fingers several moments to unloose, and dropping one hand to his side, he held it there rigid as he saluted with two fingers at the brim of an imaginary hat; while his roving eye quickly took in the various motley articles of furniture of our camp,—a small kitchen table with oil-stove and tea outfit of plain white ware, some plates and bowls, a few saucepans, half a dozen chairs, no two alike, and the two cots huddled in the shadows,—his voice, that had been pitched in a confidential key, arose to a wail:—

"The Saints luv yer honor, but do they be afther havin' bad landlords in Meriky too, that evicted yer honor from yer house, sor? I thought here nigh every poor body owned their own bit, ground and roof, sor, let alone a foine man loike yerself that shows the breedin' down to his tin toes, sor. Oi feel fer yer honor, fer there wuz I meself set out wid pig and cow both, sor (for thim bein' given Kathy by her aunt fer her fortin could not be took), six years ago Patrick's tide, sor, and hadn't she married Mulqueen that same week, sor (he bein' gardener a long time to his Riverence over in England, sor, and meetin' Kathy only at his mother's wakin'), I'd maybe been lodged in a barn meself, sor! Sure, hev ye the cow below ud let me down a drap o' milk?"

Then did Bart laugh long and heartily, for this new point of view in regard to our doings amused him immensely. Of all the local motives attributed to our garden vacation, none had been quite so naive and unexpected as this!

"But we haven't been evicted," said Bart, unconsciously beginning to apologize to an unknown straggler. "I own this place and my home is yonder; we are camping here for our health and pleasure. Come, it's time you gave an account of yourself, as you are trespassing." That the situation suddenly began to annoy Bart was plain.

Ignoring the tail of the speech, Larry saluted anew: "Sure, sor, I knew ye at first fer gintleman and leddy, which this same last proves; a rale gintleman and his leddy can cut about doin' the loikes of which poor folks ud be damned fer! I mind well how Lord Kilmartin's youngest—she wid the wild red hair an' eyes that wud shame a doe—used to go barefoot through the dew down to Biddie Macks's cabin to drink fresh buttermilk, whin they turned gallons o' it from their own dairy. Some said, underbreath, she was touched, and some wild loike, but none spoke loud but to wish her speed, fer that's what it is to be a leddy!

"Meself, is it? Och, it's soon told. Six years lived I there wid Kathy and Mulqueen, workin' in the garden, he keepin' before me, until one day his Riverence come face agin me thruble. Oh, yis, sor, that same, that bit sup that's too much for the stomick, sor, and so gets into the toes and tongue, sor! Four times a year the spell's put on me, sor, and gin I shlape it over, I'm a good man in between, sor, but that one time, sor, Mulqueen was sint to Lunnon, sor, and I missed me shlape fer mischief.

"Well, thinks I, I'll go to Meriky and see me Johnny, me youngest; most loike they're more used to the shlapin' spells out there where all is free; but they wasn't! Johnny's a sheriff and got money wid his woman, and she's no place in her house fit fer the old man resting the drap off. So he gives me money to go home first class, and says he'll sind another bit along to Kathy fer me keepin'.

"This was come Easter, and bad cess, one o' me shlapes was due, and so I've footed it to get a job to take me back to Kathy. If I could strike a port just right, Hiven might get me home between times in a cattle boat.

"I'm that well risted now I could do good work if I had full feed, maybe till Michaelmas. Hiven rest ye, sor, but have ye ever a job o' garden work now on yer estate, sor, that would kape me until I got the bit to cross to Kathy?"

As Bart hesitated, I burst forth, "Have you ever tended flowers, Larry?"

"Flowers, me leddy?—that's what I did fer his Riverence, indoors and out, and dressed them fer the shows, mem, and not few's the prize money we took. His Riverence, he called a rose for Kathy, that is to say Kathleen; 'twas that big 'twould hide yer face. Flowers, is it? Well, I don't know!"

Bart, meanwhile, had made a plan, telling Larry that he would draw a cup of tea and give him something to eat, while he thought the matter over. He soon had the poor fellow wrapped in an old blanket and snoring comfortably in the straw, while, as the rain had stopped and dawn began to show the outlines of Opal Farm, Bart suggested that I had best go indoors and finish my broken sleep, while he had a chance to scrutinize Larry by daylight before committing himself.

When he rejoined me several hours later for an indoor breakfast, for it had turned to rain again and promised several days of the saturate weather that makes even a mountain camp utterly dreary, he brought me the news that Larry was to work for me especially, beginning on the rose bed,—that he would lodge with Amos Opie and take his meals with Anastasia, who thinks it likely that they are cousins on the mothers' side, as they are both of the same parish and name. The exact way of our meeting with him need not be dwelt upon domestically, for the sake of discipline, as he will have more self-respect among his fellows in the combination clothes we provided, "until his baggage arrives." He is to be paid no money, and allowed to "shlape" if a spell unhappily arrives. When the season is over, Bart agrees to see him on board ship with a prepaid passage straight to Kathy, and whatever else is his due sent to her! Meanwhile he promised to "fit the leddy with the tastiest garden off the old sod!"

So here we are!

This chronicle should have a penny-dreadful title, "Their Midnight Adventure, or How it Rained a Rose Gardener!" Tell me about the ferns next time; we have only moved the glossy Christmas and evergreen-crested wood ferns as yet, being sure of these.

How about our fencing? Ask Evan. You remember that we have a picket-fence toward the road, but on three sides the boundary is only a tumble-down stone wall in which bird cherries have here and there found footing. We have a chance to sell the stones, and Bart is thinking of it, as it will be too costly to rebuild on a good foundation. The old wall was merely a rough-laid pile.



IX

FERNS, FENCES, AND WHITE BIRCHES

(Barbara Campbell to Mary Penrose)

Hemlock Hills, July 3. For nearly a week we have been sauntering through this most entrancing hill country, practically a pedestrian trip, except that the feet that have taken the steps have been shod with steel instead of leather. Your last chronicle has followed me, and was read in a region so pervaded by ferns that your questions concerning their transplanting would have answered themselves if you could have only perched on the rock beside me. There is a fern-lined ravine below, a fern-bordered road in front; and above a log cottage, set in a clearing in the hemlocks which has for its boundaries the tumble-down fence piled by the settlers a century or two ago, its crevices now filled by leaf-mould, has become at once a natural fernery and a barrier. Why do you not use your old wall in a like manner? Of course your stones may be too closely piled and lack the time-gathered leaf-mould, but a little discretion in removing or tipping a stone here and there, and a crowbar for making pockets, would work wonders. You might even exchange the surplus rocks for leaf-mould, load by load; at any rate large quantities of fern soil must be obtainable for the carting at the reservoir woods.

Imagine the effect, if you please, of that irregular line of rocks swathed in vines and sheltering great clumps of ferns, while it will afford an endless shelter for every sort of wild thing that you may pick up in your rambles. Of course you need not plant it all at once, but having made the plan, develop it at leisure.

You should never quite finish a country place unless you expect to leave it. The something more in garden life is the bale of hay before the horse's nose on the uphill road. Last year, for almost a week, we thought our garden quite as finished as the material and surroundings would allow,—it was a strange, dismal, hollow sort of feeling. However, it was soon displaced by the desire that I have to collect my best roses in one spot, add to them, and gradually form a rosary where the Garden Queen and all her family may have the best of air, food, and lodgings. You see I feared that the knoll, hardy beds, and rose garden were not sufficient food for your mind to ruminate, so I add the fern fence as a sort of dessert!



"Where is the shade that ferns need?" I hear you ask, "for except under some old apple trees and where the bird cherries grow (and they, though beautiful at blooming time and leaf fall, attract tent caterpillars), the stone wall lies in the sun!"

Yes, but in one of the woodland homes of this region I have seen a screen placed by such a rustic stone fence that it not only served the purpose of giving light shade, but was a thing of beauty in itself, dividing the vista into many landscapes, the frame being long or upright according to the planter's fancy.

Do you remember the old saying "When away keep open thine eyes, and so pack thy trunk for the home-going?"

On this drive of ours I've been cramming my trunk to overflowing, and yet the ideas are often the simplest possible, for the people of this region, with more inventive art than money, have the perfect gift of adapting that which lies nearest to hand.

You spoke in your last chronicle of the screen of white birches through which you saw the sun rise over the meadows of Opal Farm. This birch springs up in waste lands almost everywhere. We have it in abundance in the wood lot on the side of our hill, and it is scattered through the wet woods below our wild walk, showing that all it needs is a foothold.

Because it is common and the wood rather weak and soft, landscape gardening has rather passed it by, turning a cold shoulder, yet the slender tree is very beautiful. True, it has not the length of life, the girth and strength of limb, of the silver-barked canoe birch, but the white birch will grow in a climate that fevers its northern cousin. In spite of its delicate qualities, it is not a trivial tree, for I have seen it with a bole of more than forty feet in length, measuring eighteen inches through at the ground. When you set it, you are not planting for posterity, perhaps, but will gain a speedy result; and the fertility of the tree, when once established, will take care of the future.

What is more charming after a summer shower than a natural cluster of these picturesque birches, as they often chance to group themselves in threes, like the Graces—the soft white of the trunks, with dark hieroglyphic shadows here and there disappearing in a drapery of glossy leaves, green above and reflecting the bark colour underneath, all a-quiver and more like live things poised upon the russet twigs than delicate pointed leaves! Then, when the autumn comes, how they stand out in company with cedar bushes and sheep laurel on the hillsides to make beautiful the winter garden, and we stand in mute admiration when these white birches reach from a snowbank and pencil their frosty tracery against a wall of hemlocks.

This is the simple material that has been used with such wonderful effect. In the gardens hereabout they have flanked their alleys with the birches, for even when fully grown their habit is more poplar-like than spreading, and many plants, like lilies, requiring partial shade flourish under them; while for fences and screens the trees are planted in small groups, with either stones and ferns, or shrubs set thick between, and the most beautiful winter fence that Evan says he has ever seen in all his wanderings amid costly beauty was when, last winter, in being here to measure for some plans, he came suddenly upon an informal boundary and screen combined, over fifty feet in length, made of white birches,—the groups of twos and threes set eight or ten feet apart, the gaps being filled by Japanese barberries laden with their scarlet fruit. Even now this same screen is beautiful enough with its shaded greens, while the barberries in their blooming time, and the crimson leaf glow of autumn, give it four distinct seasons.

The branches of the white birch being small and thickly set, they may be trimmed at will, and windows thus opened here and there without the look of artifice or stiffness.

Fences are always a moot question to the gardener, for if she has a pleasant neighbour, she does not like to raise an aggressive barrier or perhaps cut off the view, yet to a certain extent I like being walled in at least on two sides. A total lack of boundaries is too impersonal,—the eye travels on and on: there is nothing to rest it by comparison. Also, where there are no fences or hedges,—and what are hedges but living fences,—there is nothing to break the ground draught in winter and early springtime. The ocean is much more beautiful and full of meaning when brought in contact with a slender bit of coast. The moon has far more majesty when but distancing the tree-tops than when rolling apparently at random through an empty sky. A vast estate may well boast of wide sweeps and open places, but the same effect is not gained, present fashion to the contrary, by throwing down the barriers between a dozen homes occupying only half as many acres. Preferable is the cosey English walled villa of the middle class, even though it be a bit stuffy and suggestive of earwigs. The question should not be to fence or not to fence, but rather how to fence usefully and artistically, and any one who has an old stone wall, such as you have, moss grown and tumble-down, with the beginnings of wildness already achieved, has no excuse for failure. We have seen other fences here where bushes, wire, and vines all take part, but they cannot compete with an old wall.

With ferns, a topic opens as long and broad and deep as the glen below us, and of almost as uncertain climbing, for it is not so much what ferns may be dug up and, as individual plants, continue to grow in new surroundings, but how much of their haunt may be transplanted with them, that the fern may keep its characteristics. Many people do not think of this, nor would they care if reminded. Water lilies, floating among their pads in the still margin of a stream, with jewelled dragon-flies darting over, soft clouds above and the odour of wild grapes or swamp azalea wafting from the banks, are no more to them than half a dozen such lilies grown in a sunken tub or whitewashed basin in a backyard; rather are they less desirable because less easily controlled and encompassed. Such people, and they are not a few, belong to the tribe of Peter Bell, who saw nothing more in the primrose by the river's brim than that it was a primrose, and consequently yellow. Doubtless it would have looked precisely the same to him, or even more yellow, if it had bloomed in a tin can!

We do not treat our native ferns with sufficient respect. Homage is paid in literature to the palm, and it is an emblem of honour, but our New England ferns, many of them equally majestic, are tossed into heaps for hay and mown down by the ruthless scythe of the farmer every autumn when he shows his greatest agricultural energy by stripping the waysides of their beauty prior to the coming of the roadmender with his awful "turn-piking" process. If, by the way, the automobilists succeed in stopping this piking practice, we will print a nice little prayer for them and send it to Saint Peter, so that, though it won't help them in this world,—that would be dangerous,—it will by and by!

In the woods the farmer allows the ferns to stand, for are they not one of the usual attributes of a picnic? Stuck in the horses' bridle, they keep off flies; they serve to deck the tablecloth upon which the food is spread; gathered in armfuls, they somewhat ease the contact of the rheumatic with the rocks, upon which they must often sit on such occasions. They provide the young folks with a motive to seek something further in the woods, and give the acquisitive ladies who "press things" much loot to take home, and all without cost.

This may not be respectful treatment, but it is not martyrdom; the fern is a generous plant, a thing of wiry root-stock and prehistoric tenacity; it has not forgotten that tree ferns are among its ancestors; when it is discouraged, it rests and grows again. But imagine the feelings of a mat of exquisite maidenhair rent from a shady slope with moss and partridge vine at its feet, and quivering elusive woodland shade above, on finding itself unceremoniously crowded into a bed, between cannas or red geraniums! Or fancy the despair of either of the wide-spreading Osmundas, lovers of stream borders opulent with leaf-mould, or wood hollows deep with moist richness, on finding themselves ranged in a row about the porch of a summer cottage, each one tied firmly to a stake like so many green parasols stuck in the dry loam point downward!

It is not so much a question of how many species of native ferns can be domesticated, for given sufficient time and patience all things are possible, but how many varieties are either decorative, interesting, or useful away from their native haunts. For any one taking what may be called a botanical interest in ferns, a semi-artificial rockery, with one end in wet ground and the other reaching dry-wood conditions, is extremely interesting. In such a place, by obtaining some of the earth with each specimen and tagging it carefully, an out-of-door herbarium may be formed and something added to it every time an excursion is made into a new region. Otherwise the ferns that are worth the trouble of transplanting and supplying with soil akin to that from which they came, are comparatively few. Of decorative species the Osmundas easily lead; being natives of swampy or at least moist ground, they should have a like situation, and yet so strong are their roots and crown of leaves that they will flourish for years after the moisture that has fed them has been drained and the shading overgrowth cut away, even though dwarfed in growth and coarsened in texture. Thus people seeing them growing under these conditions in open fields and roadside banks mistake their necessities.

The Royal fern (Osmunda regalis) positively demands moisture; it will waive the matter of shade in a great degree, but water it must have.

The Cinnamon fern, that encloses the spongelike, brown, fertile fronds in the circle of green ones, gains its greatest size of five feet in roadside runnels or in springy places between boulders in the river woods; yet so accommodating is it that you can use it at the base of your knoll if a convenient rock promises both reasonable dampness and shelter.

The third of the family (Osmunda Claytonia) is known as the Interrupted fern, because in May the fertile black leaflets appear in the middle of the fronds and interrupt the even greenness. This fern will thrive in merely moist soil and is very charming early in the season, but like the other two, out of its haunts, cannot be relied upon after August.

As a fern for deep soil, where walking room can be allowed it, the common brake, or bracken (Pteris aquilina) is unsurpassed. It will grow either in sandy woods or moist, and should have a certain amount of high shade, else its broad fronds, held high above the ground umbrella-wise, will curl, grow coarse, and lose the fernlike quality altogether. You can plant this safely in the bit of old orchard that you are giving over to wild asters, black-eyed Susan, and sundrops, but mind you, be sure to take both Larry and Barney, together with a long post-hole spade, when you go out to dig brakes,—they are not things of shallow superficial roots, I can assure you.

A few years ago Evan, Timothy Saunders, and I went brake-hunting, I selecting the groups and the menkind digging great solid turfs a foot or more in depth, in order to be sure the things had native earth enough along to mother them into comfortable growth. Proudly we loaded the big box wagon, for we had taken so much black peat (as the soil happened to be) that not a root hung below and success was certain.

When, on reaching home, in unloading, one turf fell from the cart and crumbled into fragments, to my dismay I found that the long, tough stalk ran quite through the clod and we had no roots at all, but that (if inanimate things can laugh) they were all laughing at us back in the meadow and probably another foot underground. Yet brakes are well worth the trouble of deep digging, for if once established, a waste bit, where little else will flourish, is given a graceful undergrowth that is able to stand erect even though the breeze plays with the little forest as it does with a field of grain. Then, too, the brake patch is a treasury to be drawn from when arranging tall flowers like foxgloves, larkspurs, hollyhocks, and others that have little foliage of their own.

The fact that the brake does not mature its seeds that lie under the leaf margin until late summer also insures it a long season of sightliness, and when ripeness finally draws nigh, it comes in a series of beautiful mellow shades, varying from straw through deep gold to russet, such as the beech tree chooses for its autumn cloak.

Another plant there is, a low-growing shrub, having long leaves with scalloped edges, giving a spicy odour when crushed or after rain, that I must beg you to plant with these brakes. It is called Sweet-fern, merely by courtesy, from its fernlike appearance, for it is of the bayberry family and first cousin to sweet gale and waxberry.

The digging of this also is a process quite as elusive as mining for brakes; but when once it sets foot in your orchard, and it will enjoy the drier places, you will have a liberal annex to your bed of sweet odours, and it may worthily join lemon balm, mignonette, southernwood, and lavender in the house, though in the garden it would be rather too pushing a companion.

Next, both decorative and useful, comes the Silvery Spleenwort, that is content with shade and good soil of any sort, so long as it is not rank with manure. It has a slender creeping root, but when it once takes hold, it flourishes mightily and after a year or so will wave silver-lined fronds three feet long proudly before you, a rival of Osmunda!

A sister spleenwort is the beautiful Lady fern, whose lacelike fronds have party-coloured stems, varying from straw through pink and reddish to brown, giving an unusual touch of life and warmth to one of the cool green fern tribe. In autumn the entire leaf of this fern, in dying, oftentimes takes these same hues; it is decorative when growing and useful to blend with cut flowers. It naturally prefers woods, but will settle down comfortably in the angle of a house or under a fence, and will be a standby in your wall rockery.

The ferns that seem really to prefer the open, one taking to dry and two to moist ground, are the hay-scented fern (Dicksonia punctilobula), the New York fern (Dryopteris Noveboracencis), and the Marsh Shield-fern. Dicksonia has a pretty leaf of fretwork, and will grow three feet in length, though it is usually much shorter. It is the fern universal here with us, it makes great swales running out from wood edges to pastures, and it rivals the bayberry in covering hillsides; it will grow in dense beds under tall laurels or rhododendrons, border your wild walk, or make a setting of cheerful light green to the stone wall; while if cut for house decoration, it keeps in condition for several days and almost rivals the Maidenhair as a combination with sweet peas or roses.

The New York fern, when of low stature, is one of the many bits of growing carpet of rich cool woods. If it is grown in deep shade, the leaves become too long and spindling for beauty. When in moist ground, quite in the open, or in reflected shade, the fresh young leaves of a foot and under add great variety to the grass and are a perfect setting for table decorations of small flowers. We have these ferns all through the dell. If they are mown down in June, July sees a fresh crop, and their spring green is held perpetual until frost.

The Marsh Shield-fern of gentian meadows is the perfect small fern for a bit of wet ground, and is the green to be used with all wild flowers of like places. One day last autumn I had a bouquet of grass-of-Parnassus, ladies' tresses, and gentian massed thickly with these ferns, and the posey lived for days on the sunny window shelf of the den (for gentians close their eyes in shade),—a bit of the September marshland brought indoors.

The two Beech-ferns, the long and the broad, you may grow on the knoll; give the long the dampest spots, and place the broad where it is quite dry. As the rootstocks of both these are somewhat frail, I would advise you to peg them down with hairpins and cover well with earth. By the way, I always use wire hairpins to hold down creeping rootstocks of every kind; it keeps them from springing up and drying before the rootlets have a chance to grasp the soil.

The roots of Maidenhair should always be treated in this way, as they dry out very quickly. This most distinctive of our New England ferns will grow between the rocks of your knoll, as well as in deep nooks in the fence. It seems to love rich side-hill woods and craves a rock behind its back, and if you are only careful about the soil, you can have miniature forests of it with little trouble. As for maidenhair, all its uses are beauty!

Give me a bouquet of perfect wild rosebuds within a deep fringe of maidenhair to set in a crystal jar where I may watch the deep pink petals unfold and show the golden stars within; let me breathe their first breath of perfume, and you may keep all the greenhouse orchids that are grown.

Though you can have a variety of ferns in other locations, those that will thrive best on the knoll and keep it ever green and in touch with laurel and hemlock, are but five,—the Christmas fern, the Marginal Shield-fern, the common Rock Polypody, the Ebony Spleenwort, and the Spinulose Wood-fern. Of the first pair it is impossible to have too many. The Christmas fern, with its glistening leaves of holly green, has a stout, creeping rootstock, which must be firmly secured, a few stones being added temporarily to the hairpins to give weight. The Evergreen Wood-fern and Ebony Spleenwort, having short rootstocks, can be tucked into sufficiently deep holes between rocks or in the hollows left by small decayed stumps, while the transplanting of the Rock Polypody is an act where luck, recklessness, and a pinch of magic must all be combined.

You will find vast mats of these leathery little Polypodys growing with rock-selaginella on the great boulders of the river woods. As these are to be split up for masonry, the experiment of transferring the polypody is no sin, though it savours somewhat of the process of skin-grafting. Evan and I have tried the experiment successfully, so that it is no fable. We had a bit of shady bank at home that proved by the mosses that grew on it that it was moistened from beneath the year through. The protecting shade was of tall hickories, and a rock ledge some twenty feet high shielded it from the south and east. We scraped the moss from a circle of about six feet and loosened the surface of the earth only, and very carefully. Then we spread some moist leaf-mould on the rough but flat surface of a partly exposed rock. Going to a near-by bit of woods that was being despoiled, as in your valley, we chose two great mats of polypody and moss that had no piercing twigs to break the fabric, and carefully peeled them from the rocks, as you would bark from a tree, the matted rootstocks weaving all together. Moistening these thoroughly, we wrapped them in a horse blanket and hurried home. The earth and rock already prepared were sprinkled with water and the fern fabric applied and gently but firmly pressed down, that resting on the earth being held by the ever useful hairpin!

The rock graft was more difficult, but after many failures by way of stones that rolled off, a coarse network of cords was put across and fastened to whatever twigs or roots came in the way. Naturally a period of constant sprinkling followed, and for that season the rock graft seemed decidedly homesick, but the next spring resignation had set in, and two years later the polypodys had completely adopted the new location and were prepared to appropriate the whole of it.

So you see that there are comparatively only a few ferns, after all, that are of great value to The Garden, You, and I, and likewise there are but a few rules for their transplanting, viz.:—

Don't bother about the tops, for new ones will grow, but look to the roots, and do not let them be exposed to the air or become dry in travel. Examine the quality of soil from which you have taken the ferns, and if you have none like it nearer home, take some with you for a starter! Never dig up more on one day than you can plant during the next, and above all remember that if a fern is worth tramping the countryside for, it is worth careful planting, and that the moral remarks made about the care in setting out of roses apply with double force to the handling of delicate wild flowers and ferns.

Good luck to your knoll, Mary Penrose, and to your fern fence, if that fancy pleases you. May the magic of fern seed fill your eyes and let you see visions, the goodly things of heart's desire, when, all being accomplished, you pause and look at the work of your hands.

"And nimble fay and pranksome elf Flash vaguely past at every turn, Or, weird and wee, sits Puck himself, With legs akimbo, on a fern!"



X

FRANKNESS,—GARDENING AND OTHERWISE

(Mary Penrose to Barbara Campbell)

July 15.—Midsummer Night. Since the month came in, vacation time has been suspended, insomuch that Bart goes to the office every day, Saturdays excepted; but we have not returned to our indoor bedroom. Once it seemed the definition of airy coolness, with its three wide windows, white matting, and muslin draperies, but now—I fully understand the relative feelings of a bird in a cage and a bird in the open. The air blows through the bars and the sun shines through them, but it is still a cage.

In these warm, still nights we take down the slat screens that hang between the hand-hewn chestnut beams of the old barn, and with the open rafters of what was a hay-loft above us, we look out of the door-frame straight up at the stars and sometimes drag our cots out on the wide bank that tops the wall, overlooking the Opal Farm, and sleep wholly under the sky.

These two weeks past we have had the Infant with us at night, clad in a light woollen monkey-suit nighty with feet, her crib being, however, under cover. Her open-eyed wonder has been a new phase of the vacation. Knowing no fear, she has begun to develop a feeling of kinship with all the small animals, not only of the barn but dwellers on Opal Farm as well, and when she discovered a nest of small mice in an old tool-box under the eaves and proposed to take them, in their improvised house, to her very own room at the opposite end, this "room" being a square marked around her bed by small flower-pots, set upside down, I protested, as a matter of course, saying that mice were not things to handle, and besides they would die without their mother.

The Infant, still clutching the box, looked at me in round-eyed wonder: "I had Dinah and the kittens to play with in the nursery, didn't I, mother?"

"Certainly!"

"And when Ann-stasia brought them up in her ap'n, Dinah walked behind, didn't she?"

"Yes, I think so!"

"Ver-r-y well, the mouse mother will walk behind too, and I love mice better'n cats, for they have nicer hands; 'sides, mother, don't you know who mice really and truly are, and why they have to hide away? They are the horses that fairlies drive, and I'm going to have these for the fairlies in my village!" making a sweep of her arm toward the encampment of flower-pots; "if you want fairlies to stay close beside your bed, you must give them horses to drive, 'cause when it gets cold weather cobwebs gets too sharp for them to ride on and there isn't always fireflies 'n candle worms to show 'em the way,—'n it's true, 'cause Larry says so!" she added, probably seeing the look of incredulity on my face.

"Larry knows fairlies and they're really trulies; if you're bad to them, you'll see the road and it won't be there, and so you'll get into Hen'sy's bog! Larry did,—and if you make houses for them like mine (pointing to the flower-pots) and give 'em drinks of milk and flower wine, they'll bring you lots of childrens! They did to Larry, so I'm trying to please 'em wif my houses, so's to have some to play wif!"

Larry's harmless folklore (for when he is quite himself, as he is in these days, he has a certain refinement and an endless fund of marvellous legends and stories), birds and little beasts for friends, dolls cut from paper with pansies fastened on for faces, morning-glories for cups in which to give the fairies drink, what could make a more blissful childhood for our little maid? That is the everlasting pity of a city childhood. Creature comforts may be had and human friends, but where is the vista that reaches under the trees and through the long meadow-grass where the red-gold lily bells tinkle, up the brook bed to the great flat mossy rock, beneath which is the door to fairyland, the spotted turtle being warder. Fairyland, the country of eternal youth and possibility!

I wouldn't give up the fairies that I once knew and peopled the solemn woods with down in grandfather's Virginia home for a fortune, and even now, any day, I can put my ear to the earth, like Tommy-Anne, and hear the grass grow. It occurred to me yesterday that the Infant, in age, temperament, and heredity, is suited to be a companion for your Richard. Could you not bring him down with you before the summer is over? Though, as the unlike sometimes agree best, Ian and she might be more compatible, so bring them both and we will turn the trio loose in the meadows of Opal Farm with a mite of a Shetland pony that The Man from Everywhere has recently bestowed upon the Infant—crazy, extravagant man! What we shall do with it in winter I do not know, as we cannot yet run into the expense of keeping such live stock. But why bother? it is only midsummer now, grazing is plentiful and seems to suit the needs of this spunky little beast, and the Infant riding him "across country," as Bart calls her wanderings about Opal Farm, is a spectacle too pretty to be denied us. Yes, I know I'm silly, and that you have the twins to rhapsodize about, but girls are so much more picturesque in the clothes! What! thought she wore gingham bloomers! Yes, but not all the time, for Maria will frill her up and run her with ribbons of afternoons!

* * * * *

Back to the house and garden! I'm wandering, but then I'm Lady Lazy this summer, as The Man from Everywhere calls me, and naturally a bit inconsequent! As I said, Bart is at the office daily, and will be for another week, but Lady Lazy has not returned to what Maria Maxwell calls "The Tyranny of the Three M's,"—the mending basket, the market book, and the money-box! I was willing, quite willing; in fact it is only fair that Maria should have her time of irresponsibility, for I know that she has half a dozen invitations to go to pleasant places and meet people, one being from Lavinia Cortright to visit her shore cottage. I'm always hoping that Maria may meet the "right man" some summer day, but that she surely will never do if she stays here.

"I've everything systematized, and it's easier for me to go on than drop the needles for a fortnight or so and then find, on coming back, that you have been knitting a mitten when I had started the frame of a sock," Maria said, laughing; "make flower hay while the crop is to be had for the gathering, my lady! Another year you may not have such free hands!"

Then my protests grew weaker and weaker, for the establishment had thriven marvellously well without my daily interference. The jam closet shows rows of everything that might be made of strawberries, cherries, currants, and raspberries, and it suddenly struck me that possibly if domestic machinery is set going on a consistent basis, whether it is not a mistake to do too much oiling and tightening of a screw here and there, unless distinct symptoms of a halt render it absolutely necessary.

"Very well," I said, with a show of spunk, "give me one single task, that I may not feel as if I had no part in the homemaking. Something as ornamental and frivolous as you choose, but that shall occupy me at least two hours a day!"

Maria paused a moment; we were then standing in front of the fireplace, where a jar of bayberry filled the place of logs between the andirons. First, casting her eyes through the doors of dining room, living room, and den, she fixed them on me with rather a mischievous twinkle, as she said, "You shall gather and arrange the flowers for the house; and always have plenty of them, but never a withered or dropsical blossom among them all. You shall also invent new ways for arranging them, new combinations, new effects, the only restriction being that you shall not put vases where the water will drip on books, or make the house look like the show window of a wholesale florist. I will give you a fresh mop, and you can have the back porch and table for your workshop, and if I'm not mistaken, you will find two hours a day little enough for the work!" she added with very much the air of some one engaging a new housemaid and presenting her with a broom!

It has never taken me two hours to gather and arrange the flowers, and though of course we are only beginning to have much of a garden, we've always had flowers in the house,—quantities of sweet peas and such things, besides wild flowers. I began to protest, an injured feeling rising in my throat, that she, Maria Maxwell, music teacher, city bound for ten years, should think to instruct me of recent outdoor experience.

"Yes, you've always had flowers, but did you pick the sweet peas or did Barney? Did you cram them haphazard into the first thing that came handy (probably that awful bowl decorated in ten discordant colours and evidently a wedding present, for such atrocities never find any other medium of circulation)? Or did you separate them nicely, and arrange the pink and salmon peas with the lavender in that plain-coloured Sevres vase that is unusually accommodating in the matter of water, then putting the gay colours in the blue-and-white Delft bowl and the duller ones in cut glass to give them life? Having plenty, did you change them every other day, or the moment the water began to look milky, or did you leave them until the flowers clung together in the first stages of mould? Meanwhile, the ungathered flowers on the vines were seriously developing peas and shortening their stems to be better able to bear their weight. And, Mary Penrose,"—here Maria positively glared at me as if I had been a primary pupil in the most undesirable school of her route who was both stone deaf and afflicted with catarrh, "did you wash out your jars and vases with a mop every time you changed the flowers, and wipe them on a towel separate from the ones used for the pantry glass? No, you never did! You tipped the water out over there at the end of the piazza by the honeysuckles, because you couldn't quite bring yourself to pouring it down the pantry sink, refilled the vases, and that was all!"

In spite of a certain sense of annoyance that I felt at the way in which Maria was giving me a lecture, and somehow when a person has taught for ten years she (particularly she) inevitably acquires a rather unpleasant way of imparting the truth that makes one wish to deny it, I stood convicted in my own eyes as well as in Maria's. It had so often happened that when either Barney had brought in the sweet peas and left them on the porch table, or Bart had gathered a particularly beautiful wild bouquet in one of his tramps, I had lingered over a book or some bit of work upstairs until almost the time for the next meal, and then, seeing the half-withered look of reproach that flowers wear when they have been long out of water, I have jammed them helter-skelter into the first receptacle at hand.

Sometimes a little rough verbal handling stirs up the blood under a too-complacent cuticle. Maria's preachment did me good, the more probably because the time was ripe for it, and therefore the past two weeks have been filled with new pleasures, for another thing that the month spent in the open has shown me is the wonderful setting the natural environment and foliage gives to a flower. At first the completeness appeals insensibly, and unless one is of the temperament that seeks the cause behind the effect, it might never be realized.

The Japanese have long since arrived at a method of arranging flowers which is quality and intrinsic value as opposed to miscellaneous quantity. The way of nature, however, it seems to me, is twofold, for there are flowers that depend for beauty, and this with nature that seems only another word for perpetuity, upon the strength of numbers, as well as those that make a more individual appeal. The composite flowers—daisies, asters, goldenrod—belong to the class that take naturally to massing, while the blue flag, meadow and wood lilies, together with the spiked orchises, are typical of the second.

By the same process of comparison I have decided that jars and vases having floral decorations themselves are wholly unsuitable for holding flowers. They should be cherished as bric-a-brac, when they are worthy specimens of the art of potter and painter, but as receptacles for flowers they have no use beyond holding sprays of beautiful foliage or silver-green masses of ferns.

Porcelain, plain in tint and of carefully chosen colours, such as beef-blood, the old rose, and peach-blow hues, in which so many simple forms and inexpensive bits of Japanese pottery may be bought, a peculiar creamy yellow, a dull green, gobelin, and Delft blue and white, sacred to the jugs and bowls of our grandmothers, all do well. Cut glass is a fine setting for flowers of strong colour, but kills the paler hues, and above and beyond all is the dark moss-green glass of substantial texture that is fashioned in an endless variety of shapes. By chance, gift, and purchase we have gathered about a dozen pieces of this, ranging from a cylinder almost the size of an umbrella-stand down through fluted, hat-shaped dishes, for roses or sweet peas, to some little troughs of conventional shapes in which pansies or other short-stemmed flowers may be arranged so as to give the look of an old-fashioned parterre to the dining table.

I had always found these useful, but never quite realized to the full that green or brown is the only consistent undercolour for all field and grass-growing flowers until this summer. But during days that I have spent browsing in the river woods, while Bart and Barney, and more recently Larry, have been digging the herbs that we have marked, I have realized the necessity of a certain combination of earth, bark, and dead-leaf browns in the receptacles for holding wood flowers and the vines that in their natural ascent clasp and cling to the trunks and limbs of trees.

Several years ago mother sent me some pretty flower-holders made of bamboos of different lengths, intended evidently to hang against door-jambs or in hallways. The pith was hollowed out here and there, and the hole plugged from beneath to make little water pockets. These did admirably for a season, but when the wood dried, it invariably split, and treacherous dripping followed, most ruinous to furniture.

A few weeks back, when looking at some mossed and gnarled branches in the woods, an idea occurred to Bart and me at the same moment. Why could we not use such pieces as these, together with some trunks of your beloved white birch, to which I, via the screen at Opal Farm, was becoming insensibly devoted at the very time that you wrote me?

Augur holes could be bored in them at various distances and angles, if not too acute; the thing was to find glass, in bottle or other forms, to fit in the openings. This difficulty was solved by The Man from Everywhere on his reappearance the night before the Fourth, after an absence of a whole week, laden with every manner of noise and fire making arrangement for the Infant, though I presently found that Bart had partly instigated the outfit, and the two overgrown boys revelled in fire-balloons and rockets under cover of the Infant's enthusiasm, much as the grandpa goes to the circus as an apparent martyr to little Tommy's desire! A large package that, from the extreme care of its handling, I judged must hold something highly explosive, on being opened divulged many dozens of the slender glass tubes, with a slight lip for holding cord or wire, such as, filled with roses or orchids, are hung in the garlands of asparagus vines and smilax in floral decorations of either houses or florists' windows. These tubes varied in length from four to six inches, the larger being three inches in diameter.

"Behold your leak-proof interiors!" he cried, holding one up. "Now set your wits and Bart's tool-box to work and we shall have some speedy results!"

Dear Man from Everywhere, he had bought a gross of the glasses, thereby reminding me of a generous but eccentric great-uncle of ours who had a passion for attending auctions, and once, by error, in buying, as he supposed, twelve yellow earthenware bowls, found himself confronted by twelve dozen. Thus grandmother's storeroom literally had a golden lining, and my entire childhood was pervaded with these bowls, several finally falling into my possession for the mixing of mud pies! But between the durability of yellow bowls and blown-glass tubes there is little parallel, and already I have found the advantage of having a good supply in stock.

Our first natural flower-holder is a great success. Having found a four-pronged silver birch, with a broken top, over in the abandoned gravel-pit (where, by the way, are a score of others to be had for the digging, and such easy digging too), Larry sawed it off a bit below the ground, so as to give it an even base. The diameter of the four uprights was not quite a foot, all told, and these were sawn of unequal lengths of four, six, seven, and nine inches, care being taken not to "haggle," as Larry calls it, the clean white bark in the process.

Then Bart went to work with augur and round chisel, and bored and chipped out the holes for the glass tubes, incidentally breaking two glasses before we had comfortably settled the four, for they must fit snugly enough not to wiggle and tip, and yet not so tight as to bind and prevent removal for cleaning purposes. This little stand of natural wood was no sooner finished and mounted on the camp table than its possibilities began to crowd around it. Ferns being the nearest at hand, I crawled over the crumbling bank wall into the Opal Farm meadow and gathered hay-scented, wood, and lady ferns from along the fence line and grouped them loosely in the stand. The effect was magical, a bit of its haunt following the fern indoors.

Next day I gathered in the hemlock woods a basket of the waxy, spotted-leaved pipsissewa, together with spikes and garlands of club moss. I had thought these perfect when steadied by bog moss in a flat, cut-glass dish, but in the birch stump they were entirely at home. If these midsummer wood flowers harmonize so well, how much more charming will be the blossoms of early spring, a season when the white birch is quite the most conspicuous tree in the landscape! Picture dog-tooth violets, spring beauties, bellwort, Quaker-ladies, and great tufts of violets, shading from white to deepest blue, in such a setting! Or, of garden things, poets' narcissus and lilies-of-the-valley!

Other receptacles of a like kind we have in different stages of progress, made of the wood of sassafras, oak, beech, and hackberry, together with several irregular stumps of lichen-covered cedar. Two long limbs with several short side branches Bart has flattened on the back and arranged with picture-hooks, so that they can be bracketed against the frame of the living-room door, opposite the flower-greeting table that I have fashioned after yours. These are to be used for vines, and I shall try to keep this wide, open portal cheerfully garlanded.

The first week of my flower wardenship was a most strenuous one. I use the word reluctantly, but having tried half a dozen others, no equivalent seemed to fit. I had flowers in every room in the house, bedchambers included, using in this connection the cleanest-breathed and longest-lived blossoms possible.

Late as was the sowing, the annuals remaining in the seed bed have begun to yield a glorious crop. The fireplaces were filled with black-eyed Susans from the fields and hollyhocks from an old self-seeded colony at Opal Farm, and every available vase, bowl, and pitcher had something in it. How I laboured! I washed jars, sorted colours, and freshened still passable arrangements of the day before, and all the while I felt sure that Maria was watching me, with an amused twinkle in the tail of her eye!

One day, the middle of last week, the temperature dropped suddenly, and we fled from camp to the house for twenty-four hours, lighted the logs in the hall, and actually settled down to a serious game of whist in the evening, Maria Maxwell, The Man, Bart, and I. Yes, I know how you detest the game, but I—though I am not exactly amused by it—rather like it, for it gives occupation at once for the hands and thoughts and a cover for studying the faces and moods of friends without the reproach of staring.

By the way, The Man has hired half the house from Amos Opie—it was divided several years ago—and established helter-skelter bachelor quarters at Opal Farm. Bart has told him, over and over again, how welcome he is to stay here, under any and all conditions, while he works in the vicinity, but he says that he needs a lot of room for his traps, muddy boots, etc., while Opie, a curious Jack-at-all-trades, gives him his breakfast. I'm wondering if The Man felt that he was intruding upon Maria by staying here, or if she has any Mrs. Grundy ideas and was humpy to him, or even suggested that he would better move up the road. She is quite capable of it!

However, he seems glad enough to drop in to dinner of an evening now, and the two are so delightfully cordial and unembarrassed in their talk, neither yielding a jot to the other, in the resolute spinster and bachelor fashion, that I must conclude that his going was probably a natural happening.

This evening, while Maria and I were waiting together for the men to finish toying with their coffee cups and match-boxes and emerge refreshed from the delightful indolence of the after-dinner smoke, the odour of the flowers—intensified both by dampness and the woodsmoke—was very manifest.

"How do you like your employment?" asked Maria.

"I like the decorative and inventive part of it," I said, thinking into the fire, "but I believe"—and here I hesitated as a chain of peculiar green flame curled about the log and held my attention. "That it is quite as possible to overdo the house decoration with flowers as it is to spoil a nice bit of lawn with too many fantastic flower beds!" Bart broke in quite unexpectedly, coming behind me and raising my face, one hand beneath my chin. "Isn't that what you were thinking, my Lady Lazy?"

"Truly it was, only I never meant to let it pop out so suddenly and rudely," I was forced to confess. "In one way it would seem impossible to have too many flowers about, and yet in another it is unnatural, for are not nature's unconscious effects made by using colour as a central point, a focus that draws the eye from a more sombre and soothing setting?"

"How could we enjoy a sunset that held the whole circle of the horizon at once?" chimed in The Man, suddenly, as if reading my thoughts. "Or twelve moons?" added Bart, laughing.

No, Mrs. Evan, I am convinced by so short a trial as two weeks that the art of arranging flowers for the house is first, your plan of having some to greet the guest as he enters, a bit of colour or coolness in each room where we pause to read or work or chat, and a table garnishing to render aesthetic the aspect and surroundings of the human animal at his feeding time; otherwise, except at special seasons of festivity, a surplus of flowers in the house makes for restlessness, not peace. Two days ago I had thirty-odd vases and jars filled with flowers, and I felt, as I sat down to sew, as if I was trespassing in a bazaar! Also, if there are too many jars of various flowers in one room, it is impossible that each should have its own individuality.

To-day I began my new plan. I put away a part of my jars and vases and deliberately thought out what flowers I would use before gathering them.

The day being overcast though not threatening, merely the trail, as it were, of the storm that had passed, and the den being on the north side of the house and finished in dark woodwork and furniture, I gathered nasturtiums in three shades for it, the deep crimson, orange-scarlet, and canary-yellow, but not too many—a blue-and-white jar of the Chinese "ginger" pattern for one corner of the mantel-shelf, and for the Japanese well buckets, that are suspended from the central hanging lamp by cords, a cascade of blossoms of the same colour still attached to their own fleshy vines and interspersed with the foliage. Strange as it may seem, this little bit of pottery, though of a peculiar deep pink, harmonizes wonderfully well with the barbaric nasturtium colours. There seems to be a kind of magic blended with the form and colour of these buckets, plain and severe in shape, that swing so gracefully from their silken cords, for they give grace to every flower that touches them. When filled with stiff stalks of lilies-of-the-valley or tulips, they have an equally distinguished air as when hung with the bells of columbines or garlands of flowering honeysuckles twisted about the cords climbing quite up to the lamp.

In the hall I placed my tallest green-glass jar upon the greeting table and filled it with long stalks of red and gold Canada lilies from the very bottom of Amos Opie's field, where the damp meadow-grass begins to make way for tussocks and the marshy ground begins.

The field now is as beautiful as a dream; the early grasses have ripened, and above them, literally by the hundreds,—rank, file, regiment, and platoon,—stand these lilies, some stalks holding twenty bells, ranged as regularly as if the will of man had set them there, and yet poised so gracefully that we know at once that no human touch has placed them. I wish that you could have stood with me in the doorway of the camp and looked across that field this morning. Bart declared the sight to be the first extra dividend upon our payment to Amos Opie for leaving the grass uncut.

I left the stalks of the lilies full three feet long and used only their own foliage, together with some broad-leaved grasses, to break the too abrupt edge of the glass. This is a point that must be remembered in arranging flowers, the keeping the relative height and habit of the plant in the mind's eye. These lilies, gathered with short stems and massed in a crowded bunch, at once lose their individuality and become mere little freckled yellow gamins of the flower world.

A rather slender jar or vase also gives an added sense of height; long-stemmed flowers should never be put in a flat receptacle, no matter how adroitly they may be held in place. Only last month I was called upon to admire a fine array of long-stemmed roses that were held in a flat dish by being stuck in wet sand, and even though this was covered by green moss, the whole thing had a painfully artificial and embalmed look, impossible to overcome.

For the living room, which is in quiet green tones and chintz-upholstered wicker furniture, I gathered Shirley poppies. They are not as large and perfectly developed as those I once saw in your garden from fall-sown seed, but they are so delicately tinted and the petals so gracefully winged that it seemed like picking handfuls of butterflies.

Maria Maxwell has shown me how, by looking at the stamens, I can tell if the flower is newly opened, for by picking only such they will last two full days. How lasting are youthful impressions! She remembers all these things, though she has had no very own garden these ten years and more. Will the Infant remember creeping into my cot in these summer mornings, cuddling and being crooned to like a veritable nestling, until her father gains sufficient consciousness to take his turn and delight her by the whistled imitation of a few simple bird songs? Yes, I think so, and I would rather give her this sort of safeguard to keep off harmful thoughts and influences than any worldly wisdom.

The poppies I arranged in my smallest frosted-white and cut-glass vases in two rows on the mantel-shelf, before the quaint old oblong mirror, making it look like a miniature shrine. Celia Thaxter had this way of using them, if I remember rightly, the reflection in the glass doubling the beauty and making the frail things seem alive!

For the library, where oak and blue are the prevailing tints, I filled a silver tankard with a big bunch of blue cornflowers, encircled by the leaves of "dusty miller," and placed it on the desk.

The dining-room walls are of deep dark red that must be kept cool in summer. At all seasons I try to have the table decorations low enough not to oblige us to peer at one another through a green mist, and to-day I made a wreath of hay-scented ferns and ruby-spotted Japan lilies (Speciosum rubrum, the tag says—they were sent as extras with my seeds), by combining two half-moon dishes, and in the middle set a slender, finely cut, flaring vase holding two perfect stems, each bearing half a dozen lily buds and blossoms. These random bulbs are the first lilies of my own planting. There are a few stalks of the white Madonna lilies in the grass of the old garden and a colony of tiger lilies and an upright red lily with different sort of leaves, all clustered at the root, following the tumble-down wall, the rockery to be. I am fascinated by these Japanese lilies and desire more, each stalk is so sturdy, each flower so beautifully finished and set with jewels and then powdered with gold, as it were. Pray tell me something about the rest of the family! Do they come within my range and pocket, think you? The first cost of a fair-sized bed would be considerable, but if they are things that by care will endure, it is something to save up for, when the rose bed is completed—take note of that!

When Bart came home this afternoon, he walked through the rooms before going out and commented on the different flowers, entirely simple in arrangement, and lingered over them, touching and taking pleasure in them in a way wholly different from last week, when each room was a jungle and I was fairly suffering from flower surfeit.

Now I find myself taking note of happy combinations of colour in other people's gardens and along the highways for further experiments. I seem to remember looking over a list of flower combinations and suggestions in your garden book. Will you lend it to me?

By the way, opal effects seem to circle about the place this season—the sunsets, the farm-house windows, and finally that rainy night when we were playing whist, when The Man, taking a pencil from his pocket, pulled out a little chamois bag that, being loose at one end, shed a shower of the unset stones upon the green cloth, where they lay winking and blinking like so many fiery coals.

"Are you a travelling jeweler's shop?" quizzed Bart.

"No," replied The Man, watching the stones where they lay, but not attempting to pick them up; "the opal is my birth stone, and I've always had a fancy for picking them up at odd times and carrying them with me for luck!"

"I thought that they are considered unlucky," said Maria, holding one in the palm of her hand and watching the light play upon it.

"That is as one reads them," said The Man; "to me they are occasionally contradictory, that is all; otherwise they represent adaptation to circumstances, and inexpensive beauty, which must always be a consolation."

Then he gave us each one, "to start a collection," he said. I shall have mine set as a talisman for the Infant. I like this new interpretation of the stone, for to divine beauty in simple things is a gift equal to genius.

Maria, however, insisted upon giving an old-fashioned threepenny bit, kept as a luck penny in the centre of her purse, in exchange. How can any woman be so devoid of even the little sentiment of gifts as she is?

A moment later The Man from Everywhere electrified us by saying, in the most casual manner, "Now that we are on the subject of opals, did I tell you that, being in some strange manner drawn to the place, I have made Opie an offer for the Opal Farm?"

"Good enough! but what for?" exclaimed Bart, nearly exposing a very poor hand.

"How splendid!" I cried, checking an impulse to throw my arms around his neck so suddenly that I shied my cards across the room—"Then the meadow need never be cut again!"

"What a preposterous idea! Did he accept the offer?" jerked Maria Maxwell, with a certain eagerness.

The Man's face, already of a healthy outdoor hue, took a deeper colour above the outline of his closely cropped black beard, which he declined to shave, in spite of prevailing custom.

"I'm afraid my popularity as a neighbour is a minor quality, when even my Lady Lazy makes it evident that her enthusiasm is for meadow weeds and not myself!"

"When would you live there?" asked practical Bart.

"All the time, when I'm not elsewhere!" said The Man. "No, seriously, I want permanent headquarters, a house to keep my traps in, and it can easily be somewhat remodelled and made comfortable. I want to own a resting-place for the soles of my feet when they are tired, and is it strange that I should pitch my tent near two good friends?"

It was a good deal for The Man to say, and instantly there was hand-shaking and back-clapping between Bart and himself, and the game became hopelessly mixed.

As for Maria, she as nearly sniffed audibly at the idea as a well-bred woman could. It is strange, I had almost fancied during the course of the past month, and especially this evening, that The Man's glance, when toward her, held a special approval of a different variety than it carried to Bart and me! If Maria is going to worry him, she shall go back to her flat! I've often heard Bart say that men's feelings are very woundable at forty, while at twenty-five a hurt closes up like water after a pebble has been dropped in it.

* * * * *

Yes, Maria has been rude to The Man, and in my house, too, where she represents me! Anastasia told me! I suppose I really ought not to have listened, but it was all over before I realized what she was saying.

"Yes, mem, for all Miss Marie do be fixed out, so tasty and pleasant like to everybody, and so much chicked up by the country air, she's no notion o' beaus or of troubling wid the men!"

"What do you mean, Anastasia?" said I, in perfect innocence. "Of course Miss Maria is not a young girl to go gadding about!"

"It's not gadding I mean, mem, but here on the porch, one foine night, jest before the last time Mister Blake went off fer good, they was sat there some toime, so still that, says I to meself, 'When they do foind spach, it'll be something worth hearing!'

"'Do I annoy you by staying here? Would you prefer I went elsewhere?' says he, and well I moind the words, for Oi thought an offer was on the road, and as 'twas the nearest I'd been to wan, small wonder I got excoited! Then Miss Marie spoke up, smooth as a knife cutting ice cream,—'To speak frankly,' says she, 'you do not exactly annoy me, but I'd much rather you went elsewhere!' Och, but it broke me heart, the sound of it!"

* * * * *



LIST OF FLOWER COMBINATIONS FOR THE TABLE FROM BARBARA'S GARDEN BOKE

HEAVILY SCENTED FLOWERS, SUCH AS HYACINTHS, LEMON AND AURATUM LILIES, POLYANTHUS NARCISSUS, MAGNOLIAS, LILACS, AND THE LIKE, SHOULD BE AVOIDED.

Snowdrops and pussy-willows. Hepaticas and moss. Spice-bush and shad-bush sprays. Trailing arbutus and sweet, white garden violets. Double daffodils and willow sprays. Crocus buds and moss. Blue garden scillas and wild white saxifrage. Black-birch catkins and wind-flowers. Plants of the various wild violets, according to season, arranged in an earthen pan with a moss or bark covering. Old-fashioned myrtle, with its glossy leaves, and single narcissus, or English primroses. Bleeding-heart and young ferns. English border primroses in small rose bowls. Lilies-of-the-valley, with plenty of their own leaves, and poets' narcissus. Tulip-tree flowers and leaves. The wild red-and-gold columbine with young white-birch sprays. Pinxter flower and the New York or wood fern. Jack-in-the-pulpit with its own leaves, in a bark or moss covered jar. Pink moccasin-flowers with ferns, in bark-covered jar. Pansies with ivy or laurel leaves, arranged in narrow dishes to form a parterre about a central mirror. Iceland poppies with small ferns or grasses. May pinks and forget-me-nots. Blue larkspurs and deutzia (always put white with blue flowers). Peonies with evergreen ferns, in a central jar. Sweet-william, arranged in separate colours for parterre effect or in a large blue-and-white bowl, with graceful sprays of honeysuckle flowers. Wild roses with plenty of buds and foliage, in blue-and-white bowls. Roses in large sprays with branches of the young leaves of copper beech—or masses of Chinese honeysuckle. Roses with short stems arranged with their own or rugosa foliage in blue-and-white dishes that have coarse wire netting fitted to the top to keep the flowers in place. White field daisies, clover, and flowering grasses, in a large bowl or jar. Mountain laurel with its own leaves, in central jar and parterre dishes. Nasturtiums, in cut-glass bowl or vase, with the foliage of lemon verbena. Sweet peas of five colours with a fringe of maiden-hair ferns, the deepest colour in a central jar, with other smaller bowls at corners, and small ferns laid around mirror and on cloth between. Japan lilies, single flowers, in parterre dishes with ivy leaves, and sprays in central vase. Balsams arranged in effect of set borders. Asters in separate colours. Spotted-leaved pipsissewa of the woods with fern border, in bark-covered dish. Red and gold bell meadow lilies, in large jar, with field grasses. Gladioli—the flowers separated from the stalks and arranged with various leaves for parterre effect, or stalks laid upon the cloth with evergreen ferns to separate the places at a formal meal. Sweet sultan, in separate colours, in rose bowls, with fragrant geranium or lemon-verbena foliage. Shirly poppies with grasses or green rye, in four slender vases about a larger centrepiece. Margaret or picotee carnations with mignonette, arranged loosely in a cut-glass vase or bowl. Green rye, wheat, or oats with the blue garden cornflower—or wild blue chickory. Wild asters with heavy tasselled marsh-grasses. Goldenrods with purple iron weed and vines of wild white clematis, arranged about a flat dish of peaches and pears. All through autumn place your central mirror on a mat made by laying freshly gathered coloured leaves upon the cloth. Wallflowers and late pansies. White Japanese anemonies and ferns. Grass of Parnassus, ladies tresses, and marsh shield ferns. Garden chrysanthemums, in blue-and-white jars and bowls, on a large mat of brown magnolia leaves. Sprays of yellow witch-hazel flowers and leaves of red oak. Sprays of coral winterberry, from which leaves have been removed, and white-pine tassels. Club-mosses, small evergreen ferns, and partridge vine with its red berries, in a bark-covered dish of earth.