402 
Old Time Gardens 
Now that was certainly more than disconcerting to 
the warmest of lovers, and with a half-formed dread 
that the suddenness of his proposal of love had 
turned her brain, he ran after her, albeit somewhat 
coolly, and soon learned the reason for her extraordi- 
nary behavior. Emulous of the tempting serpent of 
old, a great black snake, Mr. Base anion constrictor , 
had said complaisantly to himself: “ Now here are 
a fair young Adam and Eve who have entered un- 
invited mv Garden of Eden, and the man fancies it 
is not good for him to be alone, but I will have a 
word to say about that. I will come to her with 
honied words.” So he thrust himself up between 
the stones of the wall, and advanced persuasively 
upon them, behind the man’s back. But a Yankee 
Eve of the year 1890 a.d. is not that simple creature, 
the Eve of the vear b.c. ; and even the Father 
of Evil would have to be great of guile to succeed 
in his wiles with her. 
A farm servant was promptly despatched to watch 
for the ill-mannered and intrusive snake who — as 
is the fashion of a snake — had grown to be as big 
as a boa-constrictor after he vanished ; and at the 
end of the week once more the heel of man had 
bruised the serpent’s head, and the third party in 
this love episode lay dead in his six feet of ugliness, 
a silent witness to the truth of the story. 
Throughout Narragansett, Locust trees have a 
fashion of fringing the stone walls with close young 
growth, and shading them with occasional taller trees. 
These form an ideal garden boundary. The stone 
walls also gather a beautiful growth of Clematis, Brier, 
