o call it to account would be ungenerous. It enters at the
narrowest part of the ground, farthest from the house, makes a long
parabola, and turns again into the street close beside the dwelling. In
the bit of lawn thus marked off, shrubs have place near the street,
three or four old apple-trees range down the middle, and along the drive
runs a gay border of annual flowers. Along the rear side of the drive
lies but a narrow strip of turf beyond which the ground drops all at
once to another level some thirty feet below. On the right this fall is
so abrupt that the only way down to it is by a steep rustic stair. On
the left, behind the house, the face of the bluff is broken into narrow
terraces, from top to bottom of which, and well out on the lower level,
the entire space is mantled with the richly burdened trellises of a
small vineyard. At the right on this lower ground is a kitchen garden;
beyond it stretch fair meadows too low to build on, but fruitful in hay
and grain; farther away, on higher ground, the town again shows its
gables and steeples among its great maples and elms, and still beyond,
some three miles distant, the green domes and brown precipices of the
Mount Holyoke Range stand across the sky in sharp billows of forest and
rock. It seems at times a pity that Mount Holyoke and Mount Tom cannot
themselves know how many modest gardens they are a component part
of--the high violin note of: gardens, like this one, "to look out from."

It stops one's pen for one to find himself using the same phrases for
these New England cottage gardens that famous travellers have used in
telling of the gardens of Italian princes; yet why should we not, when
the one nature and the one art are mother and godmother of them all? It
is a laughing wonder what beauty can be called into life about the most
unpretentious domicile, out of what ugliness such beauty can be evoked
and at how trivial a cost in money. Three years before this "garden to
look out from" won its Carnegie prize it was for the most part a rubbish
heap. Let me now tell of one other, that sprang from conditions still
more unlovely because cramped and shut in.

It was on the other side of the town from those I have been telling of.
The house stood broadside to the street and flush with the sidewalk. The
front of the lot was only broad enough for the house and an alley hardly
four feet wide between the house's end and a high, tight board fence.
The alley led into a sm