RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT 199 



year. The marking out has been made permanent 

 by the use of iron-pipe posts instead of the wooden 

 stakes, so easy to drive, so brittle in the winter, 

 and so Hkely to have disappeared next spring. I 

 get from a junk-dealer such pieces of three-quarter 

 or inch iron pipe as he has in his possession, and 

 with a hack-saw or a pipe-cutter quickly reduce the 

 incidental lengths to an even size of fifteen inches. 

 These seldom cost more than a cent each, and they 

 serve the marking purpose both well and perma- 

 nently. It is one of the garden jokes to report the 

 whispered question of a visitor, who, seeing the 

 pipe stakes of the curving walk, not yet driven 

 down even with the ground, said in my ear, 

 "I suppose those pipes are part of your irrigating 

 system.^" 



I have to deal in this whole home place with a 

 piece of ground that is not rectangular, but a 

 segment of a circle; and as the house was origi- 

 nally placed with reference to a road since aban- 

 doned, and the present street plan has no relation 

 to that road, some perplexing problems have 

 appeared. Of course, since Mr. Manning supplied 

 me with the idea that the garden axis had to be 

 that of the house, there is a base-line to work from. 

 The nearest street-corner right-angle provides 

 another base-Une, and the desirable retention of 



