had, even with the details elaborated, not only by Peter, who was
conservatism itself in his every statement, but by Miss Felicia as
well--who certainly ought to have known--you would not have believed
it possible until you had seen it. Even then you would have had to drop
into one of Miss Felicia's cretonne-upholstered chairs--big easy-chairs
that fitted into every hollow and bone in your back--looked the length
of the uneven porch, run your astonished eye down the damp, water-soaked
wooden steps to the moist brick pavement below, and so on to the beds of
crocuses blooming beneath the clustering palms and orange trees, before
you could realize (in spite of the drifting snow heaped up on the
door-steps of her house outside--some of it still on your shoes) that
you were in Miss Felicia's tropical garden, attached to Miss Felicia's
Geneseo house, and not in the back yard of some old home in the far-off
sunny South.

It was an old story, of course, to Peter, who had the easy-chair beside
me, and so it was to Morris, who had helped Miss Felicia carry out so
Utopian a scheme, but it had come to me as a complete surprise, and I
was still wide-eyed and incredulous.

"And what keeps out the cold?" I asked Morris, who was lying back
blowing rings into the summer night, the glow of an overhead lantern
lighting up his handsome face.

"Glass," he laughed.

"Where?"

"There, just above the vines, my dear Major," interrupted Miss Felicia,
pointing upward. "Come and let me show you my frog pond--" and away we
went along the brick paths, bordered with pots of flowers, to a tiny
lake covered with lily-pads and circled by water-plants.

"I did not want a greenhouse--I wanted a back yard," she continued,
"and I just would have it. Holker sent his men up, and on three sides
we built a wall that looked a hundred years old--but it is not five--and
roofed it over with glass, and just where you see the little flight
of stairs is the heat. That old arbor in the corner has been here ever
since I was a child, and so have the syringa bushes and the green box
next the wall. I wanted them all the year round--not just for three or
four months in the year--and that witch Holker said he could do it, and
he has. Half the weddings in town have been begun right on that bench,
and when the lanterns are lighted and the fountain turned on outside, no
gentleman ever escapes. You and Peter are immune, so I sha'n't waste
any of my precious ammunition on