THE AMATEUR GARDEN 



fifty-three dwellings and three short streets took 

 the place of an old farm, my grove, by sheer 

 water famine, lost several of its giant pines. 

 Wonder to me is that the harm seems at length 

 to have ceased. 



But about that ravine: one day the nature of 

 its growth and soil, especially its alders, elders, 

 and willows and a show of clay and gravel, 

 forced on my notice the likelihood that here, 

 too, had once been a spring, if no more. I 

 scratched at its head with a stick and out came 

 an imprisoned rill like a recollected word from 

 the scratched head of a schoolboy. Happily the 

 spot was just at the bottom of the impassably 

 steep fall of ground next the edge of the lawn 

 and was almost in the centre of those four 

 acres — one of sward, three of woods — which I 

 proposed to hold under more or less discipline, 

 leaving the rest — a wooded strip running up the 

 river shore — wholly wild, as college girls, for 

 example, would count wildness. In both parts 

 the wealth of foliage on timber and underbrush 

 almost everywhere shut the river out of view 

 from the lawn and kept the eye restless for a 



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