CHAPTER XXI 
THE CONSTRUCTION OF CONSERVATORIES AND SMALL 
GREEN HOUSES 
AVE you ever stepped from the chill and 
H dreariness of a windy day, when it seems as 
if the very life of all things growing were 
shrunk to absolute desolation, into the welcome 
warmth and light and fragrance, the beauty and joy 
of a glass house full of green and blossoming plants? 
No matter how small it was, even though you had 
to stoop to enter the door, and mind your elbows as 
you went along, what a good, glad comfortable feel- 
ing flooded in to you with the captive sunlight! 
What a world of difference was made by that sheet 
of glass between you and the outer bitterness and 
blankness. Doubtless such an experience has been 
yours. Doubtless, too, you wished vaguely that 
you could have some such little corner to escape to, 
a stronghold to fly to when old winter lays waste 
the countryside. But April came with birds, and 
May with flowers, and months before the first dark, 
shivery days of the following autumn, you had for- 
gotten that another winter would come on, with 
weeks of cheerless, uncomfortable weather. Or 
possibly you did not forget, until you had investi- 
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