WALKS, PATHS, ENTRANCES 65 
feel that a walk or path or even an entrance 
gateway may be more comfortably tolerated 
when its design and scale are altogether fail- 
ures but its material suitable and harmonious, 
than when a very excellent design or plan is 
executed in the wrong substance and thus 
thrown distressingly out of scale. 
Material and scale — otherwise proportion 
— affect each other so intimately that they can- 
not, as a matter of fact, be considered as 
things apart; indeed, scale in one sense is al- 
together dependent on material. For example, 
a granolithic walk leading to the door of a 
shingled cottage is out of scale even though its 
width be kept down to the minimum, whereas 
a most generous walk of gravel or even of 
bricks, loosely laid, would not be, owing of 
course to the greater harmony of material. 
Sidewalks of cement along the highway are 
unquestionably superior to any others, but 
within the garden — which means within the 
boundaries of the plot, remember — they are 
in nearly all cases quite hopeless. Indeed I 
cannot recall a single exception. There is 
something so grimly uncompromising about 
cement, so public-seeming, — and so ugly when 
brought into close relation with grass and 
flowers and the garden generally — that it puts 
