MAKING SEED AND FLOWER BEDS 51 
designed by Miss Wiseman, makes one forget the 
sharpness of the point and appears to give the 
whole triangle a better shape for a garden. 
She first drove pointed stakes in the ground in 
the exact shape she wished the bed to be, and then 
she and Timothy, with Joseph’s help, passed a line 
around the stakes, so that when Timothy began to 
take out the sods there would be no mistake about 
where he should put his spade. Miss Wiseman 
said it made her feel young again to drive stakes 
in the ground and to pass the line around them. 
When I tried it, it gave me such a pain in my back 
that I felt very old. 
After Miss Wiseman had finished her work, 
she said that, as far as the eye was concerned, we 
had changed the shape of the triangle as satisfactor- 
ily as that of the Piazza of Venice had been changed 
by the Campanile. Neither Joseph nor I knew 
what she was talking about, so she explained that, 
before the old bell tower of Venice fell, very few 
people had noticed that the wonderful cathedral 
of St. Mark’s stood on the bias, since the position 
of the tower had been such as to make the piazza 
appear a perfect rectangle. When the tower fell, 
alas, no one could help seeing that the piazza was 
not a perfect rectangle, and that the beautiful cathe- 
dral stood painfully out of line. Miss Wiseman 
loves Venice. If it were not an impossible place 
for a large garden, she would live there. 
From her telling us this story about the bell 
