COMMUTER'S WIFE 85 



Evan has sketched me a rough map of the garden, 

 showing how the ground could be utilized to the 

 best advantage without changing its characteristics, 

 which were those that best harmonized with the 

 house. This, without being an antique, is of that 

 respectable no-period style of the forties, when we 

 began to forsake good, foreign models, and grope 

 for ourselves a style that is best summed up in 

 the words Early American. Strange to say, his 

 plan does not satisfy me. It is the dearest, sunniest, 

 homiest house in the world, and yet to turn the acre 

 of ground that immediately surrounds it into the copy 

 of an Italian, Dutch, or old English garden would 

 be like enclosing it in a practical joke so cruel as to 

 wound its most sacred sensibilities. Quite like prof- 

 fering Uncle Sam himself a cardinal's hat and cloak 

 for daily use, or forcing him to wear his own beaver 

 with the uniform of a French field marshal. 



" What is an American garden ? I never heard 

 of such a thing," asked Mrs. Jenks-Smith, the good- 

 natured chatelaine of the new show place, The Bluffs, 

 on the river-bank, to which Chris has transferred his 

 talent. I told her that I used the term in relation to 

 my bit of garden ground framed in the hillside 

 woods, of which it had originally been a part; 

 that it was to be itself, and not distorted into a feeble 



