394 
Old Time Gardens 
seldom heard even in familiar speech to-day and 
never found in verse elsewhere than in this rustic 
poem. I saw one summer in Narragansett, on 
Stony Lane, not far from the old Six-Principle 
Church, a row of beehives hung with strips of 
black cloth; the house mistress was dead — the 
friend of bird and beast and bee — who had reared 
the guardian of the garden told of on page 396 
et seq. 
A pretty and appropriate garden furnishing was 
the dove-cote. The possession of a dove-cote in 
England, and the rearing of pigeons, was free only to 
lords of the manor and noblemen. When the colo- 
nists came to America, many of them had never been 
permitted to keep pigeons. In Scotland persistent 
attemps at pigeon-raising by folks of humble station 
might be punished with death. The settlers must 
have revelled in the freedom of the new land, as well 
as in the plenty of pigeons, both wild and domestic. 
In old England the dove-cote was often built close 
to the kitchen door, that squab and pigeon might 
be near the hand of the cook. Dove-cotes in Amer- 
ica were often simple boxes or houses raised on stout 
posts. Occasionally might be seen a fine brick dove- 
cote like the one still standing at Shirley-on-the- 
James, in Virginia, which is shaped without and 
within like several famous old dove-cotes in England, 
among them the one at Athelhampton Hall, Dorches- 
ter, England. The English dove-cote has within 
a revolving ladder hung from a central post while 
the Virginian squab catcher uses an ordinary ladder. 
The shelves for the birds to rest upon and the square 
