urally occurs, yet
occurs under its master's guidance and control and with artistic effect.

Yet it was this same story-telling bent which long held me back while
from time to time I generalized on gardening and on gardens other than
my own. A well-designed garden is not only a true story happening
artistically but it is one that passes through a new revision each year,
"with the former translations diligently compared and revised." Each
year my own acre has confessed itself so full of mistranslations of the
true text of gardening, has promised, each season, so much fairer a show
in its next edition, and has been kept so prolongedly busy teaching and
reteaching its master where to plant what, while as to money outlays
compelled to live so much more like a poet than like a prince, that the
bent for story-telling itself could not help but say wait.

Now, however, the company to which this chapter logically belongs is
actually showing excellent reasons why a history of their writer's own
acre should lead them. Let me, then, begin by explaining that the small
city of Northampton, Massachusetts, where I have lived all the latter
three-fifths of my adult years, sits on the first rise of ground which
from the west overlooks the alluvial meadows of the Connecticut, nine
miles above South Hadley Falls. Close at its back a small stream, Mill
River, coming out of the Hampshire hills on its way to the Connecticut,
winds through a strip of woods so fair as to have been named--from a
much earlier day than when Jenny Lind called it so--"Paradise." On its
town side this wooded ground a few hundred yards wide drops suddenly a
hundred feet or so to the mill stream and is cut into many transverse
ravines.

In its timber growth, conspicuous by their number, tower white-pines,
while among them stand only less loftily a remarkable variety of forest
trees imperfectly listed by a certain humble authority as "mostly h-oak,
h-ellum, and h-ash, with a little 'ickory."

Imperfectly listed, for there one may find also the birch and the beech,
the linden, sycamore, chestnut, poplar, hemlock-spruce, butternut, and
maple overhanging such pleasant undergrowths as the hornbeam and
hop-hornbeam, willows, black-cherry and choke-cherry, dogwood and other
cornels, several viburnums, bush maples of two or three kinds, alder,
elder, sumach, hazel, witch-hazel, the shadblow and other perennial,
fair-blooming, sweet-smelling favorites, beneath which lies a l