our house is barefooted! Nobody wants to see your house's
underpinning, any more than he wants to see your own!"

It is not good to be so brusque about non-penitentiary offences, but
skilful and lovely concealments in gardening were his hobby. To another
he whispered, "My dear sir, tell your pretty house her petticoat shows!"
and to yet another, "Take all those shrubs out of the middle of your
lawn and 'plant out' with them every feature of your house which would
be of no interest to you if the house were not yours. Your house's
morals may be all right, but its manners are insufferable, it talks so
much about itself and its family." To a fourth he said: "In a gardening
sense your house makes too much noise; you can hear its right angles hit
the ground. Muffle them! Muffle your architectural angles in foliage and
bloom. Up in the air they may be ever so correct and fine, but down in
the garden and unclothed they are heinous, heinous!"

Another precept we try to inculcate in our rounds among the gardens,
another commandment in the moral law of gardening, is that with all a
garden's worthy concealments it should never, and need never, be
frivolous or be lacking in candor. I know an amateur gardener--and the
amateur gardener, like the amateur photographer, sometimes ranks higher
than the professional--who is at this moment altering the location of a
sidewalk gate which by an earlier owner was architecturally misplaced
for the sole purpose of making a path with curves--and such
curves!--instead of a straight and honest one, from the street to the
kitchen. When a path is sent on a plain business errand it should never
loaf. And yet those lines of a garden's layout which are designed not
for business but for pleasure, should never behave as though they were
on business; they should loiter just enough to make their guests feel at
ease, while not enough to waste time. How like a perfect lady, or a
perfect gentleman, is--however humble or exalted its rank--a garden with
courtly manners!

As to manners, our incipient American garden has already developed one
trait which distinguishes it from those beyond the Atlantic. It is a
habit which reminds one of what somebody has lately said about Americans
themselves: that, whoever they are and whatever their manners may be,
they have this to their credit, that they unfailingly desire and propose
to be polite. The thing we are hinting at is our American gardens'
excessive openness. Our p