hard and dry, it sank to a low
murmur, but it was seldom silent. All the year through its voice was a
lilting undertone, and the seasons ran away to the thread of its silver
song.

After all, a garden in any season is whatever it seems to its owner. To
one who plans and plants it, tends and loves it, any garden is a world
in little, a small realm of sentient personalities, of quaint and lovely
associations, of anxious strivings and concerns, of battles, of
triumphs, and of defeats. To one who makes a garden under compulsion it
is merely an inclosure of dirt and persistent weeds, a place of sun and
sweat and some more or less perverse and reluctant vegetables that would
be much more pleasantly obtained from the market-wagon. There is no
personality in it to him, nor any poetry. I know this, because I was
once that kind of a gardener myself. It was when I was a boy and had to
hoe one every Saturday forenoon, when there were a number of other
things I wanted to do. It was almost impossible to study lovingly the
miracle of the garden when duty was calling me to play short-stop on
the baseball nine that I knew was assembling on the common, with some
irresponsible one-gallus substitute in my place. Yet even in those days
I loved the fall garden. The hoeing was all done then, the weeds were no
longer my enemies. One could dig around among them and find a belated
melon, and in the mellow sunlight, between faded corn-rows, scoop out
its golden or ruby heart and reflect on many things.

III

_And how the family did grow up!_

As I look back now, that first year on our abandoned farm seems a good
deal like the years that followed it; but it could not have been so, for
when I consider to-day's aspect and circumstance I realize that each of
our twelve years of ownership furnished events that were to us unusual,
some of them, at the time, even startling.

We must have enjoyed a kind of prosperity, I suppose, for we seem always
to have been planning or doing something to enlarge the house or
improve its surroundings, and quite a good deal of money can be spent in
that way. I think it was about the second year that for the sake of
light and air we let out three dormer windows on the long roof, and I
remember that in order not to make a mistake in their architecture we
drove thirty miles one morning to see a house like ours which had owned
its windows from the beginning. We loved our old house, you see, and did
not wish to do it