It seems at times a pity that Mount Holyoke and Mount Tom cannot
themselves know how many modest gardens they are a component part
of--the high violin note of: gardens, like this one, "to look out from."
It stops one's pen for one to find himself using the same phrases for
these New England cottage gardens that famous travellers have used in
telling of the gardens of Italian princes; yet why should we not, when
the one nature and the one art are mother and godmother of them all? It
is a laughing wonder what beauty can be called into life about the most
unpretentious domicile, out of what ugliness such beauty can be evoked
and at how trivial a cost in money. Three years before this "garden to
look out from" won its Carnegie prize it was for the most part a rubbish
heap. Let me now tell of one other, that sprang from conditions still
more unlovely because cramped and shut in.
It was on the other side of the town from those I have been telling of.
The house stood broadside to the street and flush with the sidewalk. The
front of the lot was only broad enough for the house and an alley hardly
four feet wide between the house's end and a high, tight board fence.
The alley led into a small, square back yard one of whose bounds was the
back fence of the house. On a second side was a low, mossy,
picturesquely old wing-building set at right angles to the larger house,
its doors and windows letting into the yard.
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