t general dissemination" 122

"Having wages bigger than their bodily wants, and having spiritual
wants numerous and elastic enough to use up the surplus" 138

"One such competing garden was so beautiful last year that
strangers driving by stopped and asked leave to dismount
and enjoy a nearer view" 138

"Beauty can be called into life about the most unpretentious
domicile" 148

"Those who pay no one to die, plant or prune for them" 148

"In New Orleans the home is bounded by its fences, not by its
doors--so they clothe them with shrubberies and vines" 174

"The lawn ... lies clean-breasted, green-breasted, from one
shrub-and-flower-planted side to the other, along and across" 174

"There eight distinct encumbrances narrow the sward.... In a
half-day's work, the fair scene might be enhanced in lovely
dignity by the elimination of these excesses" 176

"The rear walk ... follows the dwelling's ground contour with
business precision--being a business path" 178

"Thus may he wonderfully extenuate, even ... where it does not
conceal, the house's architectural faults" 180

"... a lovely stage scene without a hint of the stage's unreality" 182

"Back of the building-line the fences ... generally more
than head-high ... are _sure_ to be draped" 184

"... from the autumn side of Christmas to the summer side of
Easter" 184

"The sleeping beauty of the garden's unlost configuration ... keeping
a winter's share of its feminine grace and softness" 186

"It is only there that I see anything so stalwart as a pine or
so rigid as a spruce" 192

MY OWN ACRE

A lifelong habit of story-telling has much to do with the production of
these pages.

All the more does it move me because it has always included, as perhaps
it does in most story-tellers, a keen preference for true stories,
stories of actual occurrence.

A flower-garden trying to be beautiful is a charming instance of
something which a storyteller can otherwise only dream of. For such a
garden is itself a story, one which actually and nat