, THE AMATEUR GARDEN 



compared and revised." Each year my own 

 acre has confessed itself so full of mistransla- 

 tions of the true text of gardening, has promised, 

 each season, so much fairer a show in its next 

 edition, and has been kept so prolongedly busy 

 teaching and reteaching its master where to 

 plant what, while as to money outlays compelled 

 to live so much more like a poet than like a 

 prince, that the bent for story-telling itself could 

 not help but say wait. 



Now, however, the company to which this 

 chapter logically belongs is actually showing ex- 

 cellent reasons why a history of their writer's 

 own acre should lead them. Let me, then, 

 begin by explaining that the small city of North- 

 ampton, Massachusetts, where I have lived all 

 the latter three-fifths of my adult years, sits on 

 the first rise of ground which from the west over- 

 looks the alluvial meadows of the Connecticut, 

 nine miles above South Hadley Falls. Close at 

 its back a small stream, Mill River, coming out 

 of the Hampshire hills on its way to the Con- 

 necticut, winds through a strip of woods so fair 

 as to have been named — from a much earlier 



