THE AMATEUR GARDEN 



compared and revised." Each year my own 

 acre has confessed itself so full of mistransla- 

 tions of the true text of gardening, has promised, 

 each season, so much fairer a show in its next 

 edition, and has been kept so prolongedly busy 

 teaching and reteaching its master w^here to 

 plant what, while as to money outlays compelled 

 to live so much more like a poet than like a 

 prince, that the bent for story-telling itself could 

 not help but say wait. 



Now, however, the company to which this 

 chapter logically belongs is actually showing ex- 

 cellent reasons why a history of their writer's 

 own acre should lead them. Let me, then, 

 begin by explaining that the small city of North- 

 ampton, Massachusetts, where I have Hved all 

 the latter three-fifths of my adult years, sits on 

 the first rise of ground which from the west over- 

 looks the alluvial meadows of the Connecticut, 

 nine miles above South Hadley Falls. Close at 

 its back a small stream. Mill River, coming out 

 of the Hampshire hills on its way to the Con- 

 necticut, winds through a strip of woods so fair 

 as to have been named — from a much earlier 



4 



