warm me. On every side were the great muddy
rivers, the ragged mountains from which the timber was being
ruthlessly torn away, the vast tracts of wild country, and the
gulches that were like wounds in the earth; everywhere the glare of
that relentless energy which followed me like a searchlight and
seemed to scorch and consume me. I could only hide myself in the
tangled garden, where the dropping of a leaf or the whistle of a
bird was the only incident.

"The Hartwell homestead had been sold away little by little, until
all that remained of it was garden and orchard. The house, a square
brick structure, stood in the midst of a great garden which sloped
toward the river, ending in a grassy bank which fell some forty feet
to the water's edge. The garden was now little more than a tangle of
neglected shrubbery; damp, rank, and of that intense blue-green
peculiar to vegetation in smoky places where the sun shines but
rarely, and the mists form early in the evening and hang late in the
morning.

"I shall never forget it as I saw it first, when I arrived there in
the chill of a backward June. The long, rank grass, thick and soft
and falling in billows, was always wet until midday. The gravel
walks were bordered with great lilac-bushes, mock-orange, and
bridal-wreath. Back of the house was a neglected rose garden,
surrounded by a low stone wall over which the long suckers trailed
and matted. They had wound their pink, thorny tentacles, layer upon
layer, about the lock and the hinges of the rusty iron gate. Even
the porches of the house, and the very windows, were damp and heavy
with growth: wistaria, clematis, honeysuckle, and trumpet vine. The
garden was grown up with trees, especially that part of it which lay
above the river. The bark of the old locusts was blackened by the
smoke that crept continually up the valley, and their feathery
foliage, so merry in its movement and so yellow and joyous in its
color, seemed peculiarly precious under that somber sky. There were
sycamores and copper beeches; gnarled apple-trees, too old to bear;
and fall pear-trees, hung with a sharp, hard fruit in October; all
with a leafage singularly rich and luxuriant, and peculiarly vivid
in color. The oaks about the house had been old trees when my
great-grandfather built his cabin there, more than a century before,
and this garden was almost the only spot for miles along the river
where any of the original forest growth still survived. The sm