82 HOW TO MAKE A COUNTRY PLACE 



Pineapple Cloth. 



Many a New England housewife in olden times robed her- 

 self for "meetin' " in the yellow pineapple cloth brought from across 

 the water. 



Among the yuccas grew the fiery, yellow-hearted, red-jacketed 

 red-hot-poker-plant, the tritoma, or torch lily, and from the shores 

 of the Sound a batch of prickly pears was transplanted that looked 

 like a bed of hardy, creeping cacti. In doing this we encountered 

 for the first time the wood-jigger, that buries itself beneath the skin 

 and revels in eating it in chunks. A soaking in hot water and rough 

 treatment with a scrub brush dislodged the intruder, but he left 

 unpleasant memories. 



One shrub section included the graceful leaved Desmodium, 

 the fragrant strawberry shrub (the calycanthus), the bush honey- 

 suckle, Japan quince, sweet pepper bush, colutea, Persian and Japanese 

 lilac, English holly, and Styrax japonica, 



The Poets' Corner. 



The Poets' Corner was edged by a border of narcissi. 



"Who loves a garden still his Eden keeps" 



was well exampled in this little plot where were seed-grown plants 

 from Stratford-on-Avon to Kendal Green and Abney Park, and from 

 Pere la Chaise to the Florentine and Roman "God's Acres" that front 

 the Porta la Pinta and Porta san Paola. 



Many friends encouraged this fancy, sending rare specimens. 

 One enthusiast mailed a few grains that had lain dormant wrapped 

 with a mummy for two thousand years in a Theban tomb, but truth 

 compels the statement that Connecticut soil and prodigious care failed 

 to bring them to life. 



LEAVES OF THE OAK OF MAMRE. (Actual size.) 



On March 9, 1870, I stood under an enormous oak tree, one of 

 the very few Abraham's oaks, or oaks of Mamre remaining at that 

 time on the Plains of Mamre in Bethlehem of Judea. The giant 

 of this group was close to ten feet in diameter, a guarantee of its 

 great age. It was undoubtedly alive, and may have been an old tree 

 when King Herod sent forth his fiendish edict to slay the children 

 of Judea. 



