" The
garden I have described at length is planned to be looked in upon; most
town gardens must be, of course; but its competitor across the street,
of which I am about to give account, is an exception. The lot has a very
broad front and very little depth--at one side almost none, at the other
barely enough for a small house and a few feet of front yard. Why there
should be a drive I cannot say, but it is so well taken into the general
scheme that to call it to account would be ungenerous. It enters at the
narrowest part of the ground, farthest from the house, makes a long
parabola, and turns again into the street close beside the dwelling. In
the bit of lawn thus marked off, shrubs have place near the street,
three or four old apple-trees range down the middle, and along the drive
runs a gay border of annual flowers. Along the rear side of the drive
lies but a narrow strip of turf beyond which the ground drops all at
once to another level some thirty feet below. On the right this fall is
so abrupt that the only way down to it is by a steep rustic stair. On
the left, behind the house, the face of the bluff is broken into narrow
terraces, from top to bottom of which, and well out on the lower level,
the entire space is mantled with the richly burdened trellises of a
small vineyard. At the right on this lower ground is a kitchen garden;
beyond it stretch fair meadows too low to build on, but fruitful in hay
and grain; farther away, on higher ground, the town again shows its
gables and steeples among its great maples and elms, and still beyond,
some three miles distant, the green domes and brown precipices of the
Mount Holyoke Range stand across the sky in sharp billows of forest and
rock.
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