102 OLD-FASHIONED GARDENING 



Thomas Hutchinson with an item for his diary more 

 than a century later. He writes that when he was 

 in Boston, "both fruit and vegetables were abundant; 

 but the dried French haricot beans were much in de- 

 mand, stewed soft with meat, and eaten as a Sunday 

 dish between the services; and many is the dinner of 

 it I there enjoyed." He further retails the yarn of 

 one popular preacher's calculations of how many 

 quarts of beans he preached to Sunday afternoons, 

 and the gross value of his congregation, reckoned at 

 the market price of beans per quart. 



By the middle of the eighteenth century Boston 

 was the largest town on the continent. It contained 

 about three thousand houses of which perhaps a thou- 

 sand were brick, the rest wood, clapboarded. The 

 earliest houses were built of the wood of the locust 

 Robinia pseudacacia a tree which had driven the 

 Englishmen wild with delight, and which was early 

 carried to English gardens, where it was pronounced 

 of all exotic trees the finest. One enthusiast says that 

 the "nightingale loves to confide her nest to this new 

 inhabitant of our climate" ; and elsewhere, "The native 

 Amercians make their bows of the wood, and point 

 their arrows with one of its thorns." 



Some of the dwellings were "very spacious Build- 

 ings which togeather with their Gardens about them 

 cover a Great deal Ground." Those of brick were 



