TAKING REINS IN HAND 



of barriers beyond, — so that the children may 

 race, from the door, over firm, clean, green 

 sward, for a gunshot away. This change has 

 not been only to the credit of the eye, but in 

 every particular economic. The cost of estab- 

 lishing and repairing the division palings has 

 been done away with; the inaccessible angles 

 of enclosures which fed monstrous wild 

 growth, are submitted to even culture and 

 cropping; an under drain through the bottom 

 of the valley lawn, has absorbed the scattered 

 stones and the tottling wall of the pasture., 

 and given a rank growth of red-top and white 

 clover, where before, through three months of 

 the year, was almost a quagmire. This drain, 

 fed by lesser branches laid on from time to 

 time through the springy ground of the peach 

 orchard, and by the waste way of the foun- 

 tain at the door, now discharges into a little 

 pool (once a mud hole) at the extremity of 

 the lawn, where a willow or two timidly dip 

 their branches, and the frogs welcome every 

 opening April with a riotous uproar of voices. 

 Even the scattered clumps of trees stand upon 

 declivities where cultivation would have been 

 difficult, or they hide out-cropping rocks which 

 were too heavy for the walls, or the drains. 

 So it has come about that the old flimsy pas- 



63 



