concluding gently. We see it in the
face of any smooth knoll or billow. I believe the artists impute to
Praxiteles a certain ownership in this double curve. It is a living
line; it suggests Nature conscious and astir as no single curve or
straight line can.

I admit that even among amateurs this is rather small talk, but it
brings me to this point: in the passage of water down a ravine of its
own making, this line of Nature astir may repeat itself again and again
but is commonly too inaffable, abrupt, angular, to suggest the ogee. In
that middle part of it where the descent is swift it may be more or less
of a plunge, and after the plunge the water is likely to pause on the
third turn, in a natural pool, before resuming its triple action again.
And so, in my ravine, some seasons later, I ventured to detain the
overflow of my first pool on a second and a third lingering place,
augmenting the water supply by new springs developed in the bottoms of
the new pools. The second pool has a surface of a thousand square feet,
the third spans nineteen hundred, and there are fish in all three,
hatched there--"pumpkin-seed" included, but also trout--among
spontaneous bulrushes, pond-lilies, flags, and dainty water-weeds; and
sometimes at night, when the reflected glory of a ten-o'clock full moon
shines up from it to the stone exedra on the lawn, I seem to have taken
my Praxitelean curves so directly from Nature that she thinks she took
them herself from me and thanks me for the suggestion.

Please observe that of great gardens, or of costly gardens whether great
or only costly, we here say nothing. Our theme is such a garden as a
householder may himself make and keep or for which, at most, he needs
professional advice only in its first planning, and for its upkeep one
gardener, with one occasional helper in pressing seasons or in
constructional work.

Constructional work. Dams, for example. In two of my dams I built cores
of concrete and thus made acquaintance with that interesting material.
Later I pressed the acquaintanceship, made garden and grove seats, a
table or two, a very modest fountain for a single jet of water in my
highest, smallest fish-pool, and even a flight of steps with a pair of
gaine-shaped pedestals--suggested by a sculptor friend--at their top.
The exedra I mentioned just now is of concrete. The stuff is a
temptation to be wary of. The ordinary gray sort--I have touched no
other--is a humble medium, and pret