266 AN AMERICAX FARMER IX EXGLAXD. 



and tells her to bring cider. Presently she takes us into the 

 garden. A pleasant garden, with plenty of large and fine pan- 

 sies, some roses, and great promise of more. It is extremely 

 neat, clean and finely kept, and it is the pride of the mistress 

 that she takes the entire care of it herself; as we walk, she has 

 her scissors in her hand, and cuts flowers, and when we are seat- 

 ed in a curious little arbor of clipped yew, where she had left 

 her "work" when she came in to see us, she arranges nosegays 

 and presents them to us. 



The house is small ; the walls are of plain red brick ; the roof 

 of slate, with but moderate pitch ; the chimneys and windows of 

 the usual simple American country-house form and size. There 

 is no porch, veranda, gable or dormer, upon the garden side, 

 yet the house has a very pleasing and tasteful aspect, and does 

 not at all disfigure the lovely landscape of distant woody hills, 

 against which we see it. Five shillings' worth of material from 

 a nursery, half-a-day's labor of a man, and some recreative work 

 of our fair and healthy hostess' own hands, have done it vastly 

 better than a carpenter or mason could at a thousand times the 

 cost Three large evergreen trees have grown near the end of 

 the house, so that, instead of the plain, straight, ugly red corner, 

 you see a beautiful, irregular, natural, tufty tower of verdure ; 

 myrtle and jessamine clamber gracefully upon a slight trellis of 

 laths over the door ; roses are trained up about one of the lower 

 windows, honeysuckle about another, while all the others, above 

 and below, are deeply draped and festooned with the ivy, which, 

 starting from a few slips thrust one day into the soil by the mis- 

 tress, near the corner opposite the evergreens, has already cov- 

 ered two-thirds of the bare brick wall on this side, found its way 

 over the top of the tall yew-hedge, round the comer, climbed the 

 gable-end, and is now creeping along the ridge-pole and up the 

 kitchen chimney which, before speaking only of boiled bacon 



