TA RR YTO U N LE TTERS. 



549 



What Dingball said, and what the frequent visi- 

 tors and strangers, who often drove past the Parson's 

 door to see what was going on in his preserves, 

 said, would make a funny book and a valuable 

 history of our graministic progress, but we must cut 

 the most of that here. 



Parson Camperdown entered into the scheme, at 

 first, with a great deal of enthusiasm. You would 

 have thought it was his own plan, to hear him talk 

 about it. Mrs. Tarryer took him very cleverly on 

 his antiquarian side. It is whispered that he has 

 the fullest and most curious collection of chamber 

 ceramics in the world, and that the very vessel with 

 which the mother* of Marcus Aurelius despised the 

 Roman sewers by emptying her slops on the grass 

 of the campus, is one of the illustrious varities of 

 his collection. The Parson also has on his book- 

 shelves all the ancient and modern agricultural 

 worthies, from Hesiod and Homer to Tusser, Jethro 

 Tull, Maxwell, Stillingfleet, Laurence, and White 

 of Selbourne, who called himself an "out-of-door 

 naturalist." With these authors, Mrs. Tarryer is 

 a great deal more familiar than Parson Camper- 

 down is, but she showed him how the planting of 

 sod, cut small, is an ancient and time-honored 

 practice, and he caught on to that idea at once. 



" Seeds vary," he said, " but a select sod has a 

 long pedigree. If I ever bought good sward seed 

 I never knew it at the time, and when I thought I 

 had, afterward, and tried to get more of the same, 

 our traders don't know where their seeds come from 

 well enough to duplicate an order. But sod carries 

 its life-history in its face." 



Parson Camperdown imagined he got these views 

 by reading, but Mrs. Camperdown knew where they 

 came from. 



Our troubles began as soon as the bits of sod 

 were planted. Public curiosity was roused at once. 

 Three local newspapers kept standing head-lines 

 and sent reporters around twice a week to see what 

 that grass was doing. Mrs. Camperdown, who was 

 kind and cheerful, even in the darkest period, 

 advised the Parson to put up a bulletin daily on the 

 street opposite their entrance ; bets were made at 

 two or three wet groceries that "what the Parson 

 has planted is twitch, or a kind of a twitch," and 

 the academy boys had a rollicking song — nine 

 abreast — about the "Camperdown gra-a-a-ass ;" 

 that, as I have hinted before, helped make Mrs. Tar- 

 ryer's nights wakeful. 



There was a week or ten days in June when it 

 certainly looked as if that rampant creeping agrostis, 



*iVlr. Tarryer is wrong in his history, but he may mean some other 

 Roman matron. — Ed. 



impelled by frequent rains and too much soluble 

 fertility, would cross the drive, scale the verandah 

 and swamp the house. Mrs. Tarryer laughed 

 easily, when she found that Dingball had used a 

 bag of fertilizer instead of the half-bushel she had 

 told him, and stopped the wild charge of the agrostis 

 with a pair of shears. 



This was the same day that Lady Schnipticket 

 and Mrs. Tarryer met at the Camperdown mansion 

 and had a conversation, the particulars of which 

 have not fully transpired before this writing. 



Mrs. Tarryer is no tattler, but she knows how to 

 defend herself. After Parson Camperdown had 

 told a four-horse load of Grangers who drove in 

 from a pic-nic — repeating three times over in his 

 loudest tone that "The grass is probably 

 FIORIN !" — Lady Schnipticket undertook to read 

 Mrs. Tarryer a lecture implying that she was too 

 forward in introducing new species of plants in 

 other people's grounds and forcing them into 

 notoriety before the public in the most embarassing 

 manner. 



Where Lady Schnipticket's opinions came from 

 was known perfectly well to Mrs. Tarryer. Her 

 foctotum was a Scotchman by the name of Mc- 

 Tavish. He made his first appearance in Tarry- 

 town with Col. Schnipticket's body, and naturally 

 remained after the funeral and made himself gen- 

 erally useful, as Scotchmen are abundantly capable 

 of doing. McTavish knew more about the stable 

 than the garden, and relieved Lady Schnipticket 

 from horse-trading entirely, so that she generally 

 had teams, double and single, that would be a 

 credit to any lady. He had not been long in Lady 

 Schnipticket's service, however, before there was 

 talk about him and one of her maids, whose parents 

 were well known too and appealed to Mrs. Tarryer ; 

 but the Scotchman married the girl and the affair 

 blew over, though McTavish did not forget it and 

 felt constrained — so it was said — by what he called 

 "petticoat government." He and Dingball, and 

 several other weedy gardeners in our vicinity, 

 thought now was their time to make a stand. 



You can well imagine that Mrs. Tarryer was not 

 the woman to accept any of that Scotchman's 

 mischief at second-hand through Lady Schnipticket. 

 After hearing the lecture aforesaid, attentively, she 

 shifted the shears into her other hand and led the 

 dowager knee-deep into that tall grass and showed 

 her how thoroughly it was covering the ground and 

 springing up thick and fine as hair at the bottom, 

 so that no weeds could live in it. 



"Now my dear Mrs. Schnipticket, don't let the 



