92 
Old Time Gardens 
other days walk beside me, though unseen and 
unheard. 
About thirty years ago a bright young Yankee 
girl went to the island of Cuba as a governess to 
the family of a sugar planter. It was regarded as a 
somewhat perilous adventure by her home-staying 
folk, and their apprehensions of ill were realized in 
her death there five years later. This was not, how- 
ever, all that happened to her. The planter’s wife 
had died in this interval of time, and she had been 
married to the widower. A daughter had been born, 
who, after her mother’s death, was reared in the 
Southern island, in Cuban ways, having scant and 
formal communication with her New England kin. 
When this girl was twenty years old, she came to 
the little Massachusetts town where her mother had 
been reared, and met there a group of widowed and 
maiden aunts, and great-aunts. After sitting for a 
time in her mother’s room in the old home, the 
reserve which often exists between those of the same 
race who should be friends but whose lives have been 
widely apart, and who can never have more than 
a passing sight of each other, made them in semi- 
embarrassment and lack of resources of mutual 
interest walk out into the garden. As they passed 
down the path between high lines of Box, the girl 
suddenly stopped, looked in terror at the gate, and 
screamed out in fright, “ The dog, the dog, save me, 
he will kill me ! ” No dog was there , but on that 
very spot, between those Box hedges, thirty years 
before, her mother had been attacked and bitten by 
an enraged dog, to the distress and apprehension of 
