402 Old Time Gardens 



Now that was certainly more than disconcerting to 

 the warmest of lovers, and with a half-formed dread 

 that the suddenness of his proposal of love had 

 turned her brain, he ran after her, albeit somewhat 

 coolly, and soon learned the reason for her extraordi- 

 nary behavior. Emulous of the tempting serpent of 

 old, a great black snake, Mr. Bascanion constrictor \ 

 had said complaisantly to himself: " Now here are 

 a fair young Adam and Eve who have entered un- 

 invited my Garden of Eden, and the man fancies it 

 is not good for him to be alone, but I will have a 

 word to say about that. I will come to her with 

 honied words." So he thrust himself up between 

 the stones of the wall, and advanced persuasively 

 upon them, behind the man's back. But a Yankee 

 Eve of the year i 890 a.d. is not that simple creature, 



the Eve of the year b.c. ; and even the Father 



of Evil would have to be great of guile to succeed 

 in his wiles with her. 



A farm servant was promptly despatched to watch 

 for the ill-mannered and intrusive snake who — as 

 is the fashion of a snake — had grown to be as big 

 as a boa-constrictor after he vanished ; and at the 

 end of the week once more the heel of man had 

 bruised the serpent's head, and the third party in 

 this love episode lay dead in his six feet of ugliness, 

 a silent witness to the truth of the story. 



Throughout Narragansett, Locust trees have a 

 fashion of fringing the stone walls with close young 

 growth, and shading them with occasional taller trees. 



These form an ideal garden boundary. The stone 

 walls also gather a beautiful growth of Clematis, Brier, 



