,
especially its alders, elders, and willows and a show of clay and
gravel, forced on my notice the likelihood that here, too, had once been
a spring, if no more. I scratched at its head with a stick and out came
an imprisoned rill like a recollected word from the scratched head of a
schoolboy. Happily the spot was just at the bottom of the impassably
steep fall of ground next the edge of the lawn and was almost in the
centre of those four acres--one of sward, three of woods--which I
proposed to hold under more or less discipline, leaving the rest--a
wooded strip running up the river shore--wholly wild, as college girls,
for example, would count wildness. In both parts the wealth of foliage
on timber and underbrush almost everywhere shut the river out of view
from the lawn and kept the eye restless for a glint, if no more, of
water. And so there I thought at once to give myself what I had all my
life most absurdly wished for, a fish-pool. I had never been able to
look upon an aquarium and keep the tenth Commandment. I had never caught
a fish without wanting to take it home and legally adopt it into the
family--a tendency which once led my son to say, "Yes, he would be
pleased to go fishing with me if I would only fish in a sportsmanlike
manner." What a beautifully marked fish is the sun-perch! Once, in
boyhood, I kept six of those "pumpkin-seed" in a cistern, and my smile
has never been the same since I lost them--one of my war losses.

I resolved to impound the waters of my spring in the ravine and keep
fish at last--without salt--to my heart's content. Yet I remembered
certain restraining precepts: first, that law of art which condemns
incongruity--requires everything to be in keeping with its natural
surroundings--and which therefore, for one thing, makes an American
garden the best possible sort of garden to have in America; second,
that twin art law, against inutility, which demands that everything in
an artistic scheme serve the use it pretends to serve; third, a precept
of Colonel Waring's: "Don't fool with running water if you haven't money
to fool away"; and, fourth, that best of all gardening rules--look
before you leap.

However, on second thought, and tenth, and twentieth, one thought a day
for twenty days, I found that if water was to be impounded anywhere on
my acre here was the strategic point. Down this ravine, as I have said,
was the lawn's one good glimpse of the river, and a kindred gleam
intervenin