FARM BARRIERS 



67 



Deer and Trout. 



The workmen who built the fence enclosed, quite by accident, 

 a pair of beautiful deer. Safe from the hunter, they enjoyed the 

 freedom of the woodland, and were one of the show sights of the 

 farm. Its trout stream in season always insured a string of non- 

 liver-fed fish. A walk 'cross country to our wood lot was a favorite 

 jaunt. 



Farm Barriers. 



Neither stone wall nor wooden fence circumscribed house yard 

 or lawn; when necessary, barriers were formed by hedges, using the 

 California privet as our standby, though there were others also through 

 the length and breadth of the two hundred and fifty acres, among them 

 a glossy-leaved laurel-willow, whose rampant growth was made com- 

 pact by severe pruning, also spruces and hemlocks, whose branches, 

 thus compelled to sweep groundward in graceful curves, formed a 

 close mass of green foliage all the year. A row of purple beeches kept 

 well within bounds and rounded into shape was as beautiful as rare, 

 but like the oak they are dead-leaf trees. The thorn-branched honey 

 locust in one field and the osage orange in another, pruned as hedges, 

 prevented our sheep from straying, and a woven wire fence hidden 

 in the foliage kept out marauding dogs. We used both hemlock 

 and spruce, in preference to Arbor Vitae. In a corner of the garden 

 was a sweet brier hedge which perfumed the air for fully one hundred 

 feet, also a glorious Rosa rugosa barrier, and near the latter a clump 

 of fine-fibred Japanese privet pruned into examples of topiary art. 



THE SUMMER STREAM AUSABLE CHASM, JR. 



