FIRST STEPS TOWARD THE HOME 37 



are put on paper at once, and these are to be viewed 

 and reviewed and amended until you are fairly sat- 

 isfied. 



You have no idea how much pleasure you will get 

 out of these preliminaries. It is a mistake to say 

 that you do not understand landscape work. Pro- 

 fessionally you do not, but you are learning a good 

 deal about such things every day, not only about the 

 surface and the roll of the land, but about the soil 

 and its needs. 



In my chapter on " Finding the Home," I told you 

 that I had known a man to live over a marl bed with- 

 out finding it out. I saw a surveyor trace a fine 

 vein of iron ore right through a dozen farms, not 

 more than three feet from the surface in places, and 

 not one of the farmers had ever suspected its exist- 

 ence. On the other hand I visited a man who had 

 a beautiful brook running through his pasture, and 

 his neighbor's sheep drank from it after it had left 

 his own pasture, but not until he had harnessed it 

 to light his house and run his machinery. It de- 

 pends a good deal upon eyes and ears and how you 

 use them. Ten acres that you do not read are like 

 ten books in Chinese on your library table. All this 

 while, you understand that you are not to try to re- 

 peat what somebody else has done, but to work out 

 your own problem in terms of the beautiful and the 

 useful. 



This charting and plotting of your property does 

 not mean a complicated piece of artistic drawing, but 



