394 Old Time Gardens 



seldom heard even in familiar speech to-day and 

 never found in verse elsewhere than in this rustic 

 poem. I saw one summer in Narragansett, on 

 Stony Lane, not far from the old Six-Principle 

 Church, a row of beehives hung with strips of 

 black cloth ; the house mistress was dead the 

 friend of bird and beast and bee who had reared 

 the guardian of the garden told of on page 396 

 et seq. 



A pretty and appropriate garden furnishing was 

 the dove-cote. The possession of a dove-cote in 

 England, and the rearing of pigeons, was free only to 

 lords of the manor and noblemen. When the colo- 

 nists came to America, many of them had never been 

 permitted to keep pigeons. In Scotland persistent 

 attemps at pigeon-raising by folks of humble station 

 might be punished with death. The settlers must 

 have revelled in the freedom of the new land, as well 

 as in the plenty of pigeons, both wild and domestic. 

 In old England the dove-cote was often built close 

 to the kitchen door, that squab and pigeon might 

 be near the hand of the cook. Dove-cotes in Amer- 

 ica were often simple boxes or houses raised on stout 

 posts. Occasionally might be seen a fine brick dove- 

 cote like the one still standing at Shirley-on-the- 

 James, in Virginia, which is shaped without and 

 within like several famous old dove-cotes in England, 

 among them the one at Athelhampton Hall, Dorches- 

 ter, England. The English dove-cote has within 

 a revolving ladder hung from a central post while 

 the Virginian squab catcher uses an ordinary ladder. 

 The shelves for the birds to rest upon and the square 



