TARRYTOWN LETTERS— XI. 



3Y A. B. TARRYER. 



A RISKY INVESTIGATION HOW SOWING " LAWN " GRASS DON't MAKE LAWNS HOW PARSON CAMPERDOWN's 



LAWN WAS REFORMED LADY SCHNIPTICKET's OPINIONS 



THE PUNISHMENT OF m'TAVISH. 



HOUGH she is apt to be right all the 

 while, Mrs. Tarryer's persistent 

 spirit of investigation sometimes 

 carries her into positions that 

 make me feel rather nervous. The 

 matter of Parson Camperdown's 

 grass, in the heat of it, while it was 

 the talk of the whole country-side, 

 and was expected, by outsiders to 

 produce permanent breaches between several excel- 

 lent families, caused even Mrs. Tarryer to lose some 

 sleep. It is all right now, and we wonder at the 

 uproar and hard feelings that are past. These are 

 worth recording as a warning and a comfort for 

 urgent experiments and those who lead their friends 

 into speculations which seem risky for a while, 

 though they turn out ever so well in the end. 



The Camperdown lawn was a large, pleasant 

 door-yard, with a beautiful sward, depastured by 

 favorite horses just out of harness, in the time of 

 Mrs. Camperdown's father. She don't think it im- 

 proved much since the greater part of it was used as 

 a paddock for ripe lambs and wethers, and guests 

 could tell by counting the flock from their bed-room 

 windows, just how many head it took to supply Far- 

 mer Sothern's hospitable table. 



The Parson had the ground trenched and the 

 tile-drained soon after the old farmer died, making 

 the grade more nicely rotund, but so stirring up the 

 deep gravel — Mrs. Tarryer declares — that in places 

 it has never stuck together enough since to afford 

 capillary moisture during periods of drought. Many 

 a load of loam and weed-seed compost has the 

 Parson applied to that lawn, and by so doing even 

 Mrs. Camperdown admits to her intimate friends 

 that the Rev'd Dionysius has raised the land around 

 the buildings and secured a moist cellar after every 

 washing rain. Men are mistaken who think their 

 wives do not understand their engineering feats ! 



Right in front of the house and just across the 

 carriage-road is an open, sunny space where the 

 grass has been nine- tenths Panic 11711 saiiguinale for 

 years, in spite of this or that "lawn-mixture," 

 raked in every spring. 



"It is strange our grass should winter-kill where 

 the drainage is so thorough," said Parson Camper- 

 down, one sunny morning in March, regarding the 

 great brown patches in front of his door, as we were 

 ending a neighborly call. 



"That grass was killed, dead as a door-nail, Mr. 

 Camperdown, by the first hard frosts last fall. That 

 is nothing but finger-grass you are raising there, sir. 

 It is strictly annual in Tarrytown." 



This dead sod of panicum the Parson stoutly 

 denied — claiming his "last mixture was largely of 

 Cyuosunts cristahis." 



"Oh, that cristatus is one of the things which 

 never come up to spoil its market !" says Mrs. Tar- 

 ryer, and then she triumphantly showed the Parson 

 a handful of the old "fingers" full of seed, recum- 

 bent in the dead sod as rolled down by the lawn- 

 mowing of the previous season. He had to give in. 



It was about that time, no doubt, that Mrs. Tar- 

 ryer really began scheming to make Mr. Camper- 

 down work out his own salvation from that pestifer- 

 ous weed. She told me on the way home that he 

 might reseed till doomsday as he was going on, 

 without ever getting rid of it. Or, being a woman 

 of great forecast, she may have been educating him 

 unconsciously for a public example all these recent 

 years. At any rate, early in April a broad patch 

 of the Parson's door-yard was planted in "dotted 

 lawn," as figured in my July letter, and the Parson's 

 Scotch-Irishman, Dingball, with one of Mrs. Tar- 

 ryer's thrust-hoes, was to hoe and cross-hoe it, three 

 times a week if necessary, to keep the weeds down. 



There are a number of grasses under strict gov- 

 ernment in our garden which Mrs. Tarryer knows 

 all about, but it appears that she had given the Par- 

 son a new pet of hers — a chance seedling in a poor, 

 dry spot, where some seedsman's fancy packets had 

 been sown. It had distinguished itself within two 

 or three years by making a circlet of close turf 

 about as big as a card-table, and as fine as moss. 

 Dingball cut that moss turf in tiny bits of half an 

 inch or more square, under Mrs. Tarryer's direc- 

 tions, and set it in straight rows each way, about 

 fourteen inches apart. 



