TARRYTOWN LETTERS— XIV. 



ABOUT MEADOWS, BROOKS, BRIDGES AND THOROUGHFARES. 

 BY A. B. TARRYER. 



>HE WOMEN I am clerking for 

 turned their attention to roads 

 and foot-paths early in autumn. 

 "iSk T ■ ~ Indeed, it was Lady Schnip- 

 ticket's road force that enabled 

 her to give such substantial 

 help to our "Late Melon 

 Party," as described in my 

 last letter. She declares — and Mrs. Tarryer fully 

 agrees with her — that " our roads and drainage are 

 so outrageously bad that we can only endure to 

 talk or read about them during the very coldest 

 weather." 



The reader must be told that the Tarryer, Camper- 

 down and Schnipticket estates He contiguous, occupying 

 an extensive and somewhat elevated 

 neck of land, bordered by and includ- 

 ing in part two considerable streams, 



which take the drainage of several 



growing villages — almost cities, some ^ 

 •of them — where the darkest ignorance "" 

 prevails in road management, and the — 

 lives of the people are spent in pro- 

 ducing what mnst eventually become, 

 unless wiser counsels prevail, only the 

 homes for river Chinese or the lowest class of foreigners. 



The management of these three estates is practically 

 under one thumb. A stranger would be able to find no 

 dividing line between them. Whose thumb that is it 

 would be hard for me to tell. " They say the Colonel 

 stole his money from the people," Lady Schnipticket 

 says, "and 1 am going to see that the people who are 

 good and wise enough to inherit the earth get it all back 

 again." Parson Camperdown's caution and Mrs. Tar- 

 ryer's taste and judgment are followed in every plan and 

 every expenditure. As a general rule, nothing is done 

 that has not been considered for at least a year, or nine 

 months of the growing season. 



But while great works are going on — always in a neat 

 and tidy manner — it is easy to draft men and teams for 

 the small matters that may be thought of over night and 

 executed during the next day or two — things which give 

 a hundred times more pleasure and use when they are 

 done quickly as well as thoroughly. 



For instance : that foot-path of near half a mile across 



the meadow. 



with two 

 ' bridges and 

 three stiles, 

 was substan- 

 tially completed in a couple of days, just after the first 



crop of hay was cut, because the material was all planned 

 and ready. The path, done as in Fig. i — four feet wide 

 and filled water-tight with fine broken stone of all sizes, 

 having gravelly old turf bedded in the edges — looked a 

 hundred years old at once. And though dwarf grasses 

 and weeds may grow upon it, the fresh cleft stone, fill- 

 ing their own interstices, are so knit together as to re- 

 main practically a rock to walk upon forever and a day. 



Those meadows are subject to sudden freshets, any- 

 how, and the bridges are built to offer no great obstruc- 

 tion to them. By considering the nature and fit art for 

 each case, the site of both bridges was so chosen as to 

 make each one of them aid in checking floods enough to 

 fertilize several acres of meadow. Two or three years 

 ago the alluvial banks of that crooked stream were graded 

 and sodded on both sides after the fashion shown in Fig. 2. 



Fig. 2. 



A Pleasant Meadow Brook. 



Fig. I. Cross Section of Path. 



The brook now has no steep banks as formerly, to be 

 undermined and gouged in freshet time. On either side 

 in haying, the mower knife dips into the pebbly bed and 

 ripples of the regularly graded bottom of the stream. 

 The spare earth from the slopes of the old banks was 

 used in smoothing and flushing holes and rough places 

 in the general surface of the meadow. It should be 

 mentioned right here, that for two years that meadow 

 has been roiied with a light steam roller earlier in spring 

 than the turf would bear draft animals, and also once 

 or twice during the summer after rains, with a corres- 

 ponding improvement of the surface that is positively 

 millennial. The hardy aquatic grasses chosen for the 

 margins of the brook make the sweetest hay, and cannot 

 be uprooted or washed away by floods. 



The two bridges aforesaid were located where the 

 narrowing of the meadow bottom on one or the other 

 side enables the kind of bridge in use to throw any sud- 

 den rise of water across the surface of the meadow. 

 Cement or terra-cotta pipe, large enough to convey the 

 regular flow of the stream only, are laid in its bed, pro- 

 tected by similar cast-iron sections at each end, bolted 

 together. These are covered with puddled gravel, pro- 

 tected by grasses suited to each point in the work. The 

 top of the bridge is not more than four feet higher than 

 the bottom of the stream, which is well lined below each 



