306 MY FARM. 



every winter in my library window, they would be 

 shocked still farther. 



There is a careless group of the most common 

 ferns ; a Rose-geranium, a Daphne, a common 

 Monthly-rose, are the rarest plants I boast of. But 

 there are wood-mosses with a green sheen of velvet ; 

 they cover a broad tray of earth in rustic frame-work, 

 in which the Geraniums, the mosses, the Daphne, 

 and a plant of Kenilworth-Ivy coquette together. 

 An upper shelf is embossed with other mosses ; there 

 is a stately Hyacinth or two lifting from among them, 

 and wild ferns hang down their leaves for a careless 

 tangle with the Geraniums and Ivy below. Above 

 all, and as a drapery for the arched top, the Spanish 

 moss hangs like a gray curtain of silvered lace. 



A stray acorn, I observe, has shot up in the tray, 

 and is now in its third leaf of oak-hood ; in the cor- 

 ners, two wee Hemlock-spruces give a background of 

 green, and an air of deeper and wilder entanglement, 

 to my little winter-garden. A bark covering, with 

 bosses of acorn-cups, and pilasters of laurel-wood, 

 sharpened to a point, make the lower tray a field of 

 wildness, fenced in with wildness. The overhanging 

 bridge (I called it an upper shelf) is a rustic gallery 

 its balcony of twisted osiers filled in with white 

 mosses from old tree-stumps, and the whole support- 

 ed by a rustic arch of crooked oaken twigs. Finally, 



