One is by the once favorite thought-promoting summer seat of Augustus
Saint-Gaudens on his own home acre in Vermont; the other I need not
particularize further than to say that it is one of the things which
interlock and unify a certain garden and grove.
[Illustration: "A fountain ... where one,--or two,--can sit and hear it
whisper."
The ravine of the three fish pools. There is a drop of thirty feet
between the upper and the lowermost pool.]
The bringing of the grove out on the lawn and the pushing of the lawn in
under the grove was one of the early tasks of my own acre. When the
house was built its lot and others backed up to a hard, straight rear
line where the old field had halted at its fence and where the woods
began on ground that fell to the river at an angle of from forty to
fifty degrees. Here my gifted friend and adviser gave me a precept got
from his earlier gifted friend and adviser, Frederick Law Olmsted: that
passing from any part of a pleasure-ground to any part next it should be
entirely safe and easy or else impossible. By the application of this
maxim I brought my lawn and grove together in one of the happiest of
marriages. For I proceeded, by filling with earth (and furnace ashes),
to carry the lawn in, practically level, beyond the old fence line and
under the chestnuts and pines sometimes six feet, sometimes twelve,
until the difficult and unsafe forty or fifty degrees of abrupt fall
were changed to an impassable sixty and seventy degrees, and every
one's instinctive choice of way was the contour paths.
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