CHAPTER II 

 WASHINGTON'S GARDEN 



THERE is a garden in America that has in its 

 keeping a memory so hallowed as to lend it 

 the quality of a shrine. To the man who 

 found a vital joy in laying out the grounds and plan- 

 ning the house it yielded rest after great labor glori- 

 ously performed, peace after the tragic violence of years 

 of war, home after the arduous career of leader to a 

 new-born nation and all the harassments of public life. 

 Washington's garden ! We have no other place like 

 it in the country. Many a relic of past days remains 

 to us, assuredly; church and tomb, birthplace and 

 monument. But here is a garden of growing flowers, 

 broad lawns, stately trees and winding paths created by 

 the same man to whom we owe a new ideal of patri- 

 otism and the foundation of our being as a nation; 

 looking now much 'as it did when he lived here, im- 

 proving it day by day, planting the trees that spread 

 their magnificent branches over house and drive, build- 

 ing the walls now overgrown with climbers, finding 

 time to superintend everything, from the rotation of 



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