222 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES 



as a happy touch set down in one of those formal 

 gardens depicted in The House Beautiful or Country 

 Life y but here beside the salty lane past Cap'n 

 Bradley's door, gaudy in colour, with her load of 

 homely flowers and her quaint little sailor man astride 

 his spar above the bright geraniums, she is perfect. 

 No boat could come to a better end. She's taking 

 portulacas to the Islands of the Blest! 



Miss Maria Mills, in the next house, never followed 

 the sea, and her idea of a garden is more conventional. 

 She grows hollyhocks beside the house, and sweet peas 

 on her wire fence. But at the lane's end, where the 

 water of the Salt Pond laps the pier, you may see another 

 old boat put to humbler uses, now that its seafaring 

 days are over, and uses sometimes no less romantic 

 than the Cap'n's garden. It is a flat-bottomed boat, 

 and lies bottom side up just above the little beach made 

 by the lap of the waves, for the tide does not affect the 

 Salt Pond back here three miles from the outlet. The 

 paint has nearly gone from this aged craft, though a 

 few flakes of green still cling under the gunwales. But 

 in place of paint there have appeared an incredible 

 number of initials, carved with every degree of skill or 

 clumsiness, over bottom and sides. This boat is the 

 bench whereon you wait for the launch to carry you 

 down the Pond, for the catboat or thirty-footer to be 

 brought in from her moorings, for Cap'n Perry to land 

 with a load of oysters; or it is the bench you sit upon to 



