62 



HOW TO MAKE A COUNTRY PLACE 



Wayside. 



A brush fire razed "Wayside," that quaint little shack with 

 attic-stored heirlooms, from the great four-poster, and its convenient 

 companion, the trundle-bed, to the Washington table. It also served 

 once as the dog on which we tried the patent wooden-board-lath, 

 advertised to take the place of the usual mason's lath. One of its 

 weak points was that unless the knots were shellacked they showed 

 through the plaster and stained the walls much more readily than 

 the ordinary lath. It also had less clinching strength. The 

 south veranda was covered in four months by that wonderful climber, 

 the Kudzu vine, which lengthened forty feet the first season, and on 

 its north side, where the winter sun could not burn it, the English ivy 

 lived through the coldest winters. Pinned down with pegs this same 

 ivy greened deeply shadowed banks and tree-dripped spaces. 



Our Mushroom Venture. 



The basement half-above-ground-cellar of Wayside was double- 

 doored and double-windowed, and shelved and binned for storage of 

 vegetables. Here too were kept the tub-plants, among them the 

 beautiful, purple-blooming, tropical-leaved hydrangeas that lined the 

 drive in summer, the bay trees that cornered the house, the brilliant 

 scarlet Hibiscus cooperii, and an oleander twelve feet high, a legacy 

 from one of our forbears. A half dozen fig trees also found a hiber- 

 nating home in that elastic vegetable cellar, and one corner was 

 partitioned off for the growing of mushrooms in a modest way which 

 required the use of a small heater. The inevitable and essential 

 clutter corner held its usual modicum of unsightly but useful articles. 



THE BACK LANE. 



