18 
HO USE & GARDEN 
U NTIL one has watched 
through it in the coun¬ 
try, she will never know what 
the dusk can be. 
Fine is the city with its 
purpling canyon streets, its 
campaniles of commerce, its streams of 
humans breasting homeward. Dusk comes 
to it to hide its gaunt realities of stone and 
steel, to veil its crudities, its ugliness; yet 
few there are who can lift eyes high enough 
to see where the first faint star shines on the 
grey horizon. 
Finer far is dusk in the country. There 
it uncovers the world which lies beneath the 
outward form and color of tree and bud. 
There the greater realities come into their 
own. And if day has its myriad noises of 
bird and beast, the night has a thousand 
more. ... In the garden ghostly forms 
abide. Where washed by day a sea of 
white phlox lies now a purple bank. Colors 
are as one: a purple lawn, a purpling path, 
a purple wall that once was red. Along 
the fence the darkening shrubs line rank 
on rank. Slowly Night swings her purple 
awning from the pillars of the trees. A 
farm boy halloes across the field. Comes 
the scroop of tortured gear as a car crests 
the hill. The handle of a swinging pail 
squeaks. Steadily, inexorably the horizon 
draws closer and closer. A handful of stars 
is spilled across the sky. Someone sets a 
light in the window. Down breeze floats 
the faint aroma of a kindled fire. 
You walk through your garden. Shape 
is gone. Color is gone. Perfume alone re¬ 
mains. Here you halt, and there. You 
gather a bouquet—a spiritual bouquet, like 
Francis de Sales. 
Then soft feet sound down the twilit lane. 
They quicken. A hob heel hits the flinty 
path. The gate clicks. He’s come! 
Supper. . . . 
* 
I T is easier to get angry about garden 
pests than to be philosophic. While 
you are accepting the aphid and the cut 
worm philosophically they are playing hob 
with your plants. Instead you strafe them 
and bless the men who invented hellebore 
and Bordeaux mixture. 
I have often wondered if this natural an¬ 
ger is due to the fact that you can fairly 
see your plants being consumed before your 
very eyes, or because, in your inmost heart, 
you know you don’t deserve such a plague. 
Surely if ever there was an example of the 
sins of the fathers being visited on the third 
and fourth generation, garden pests stand 
exalted as fulfilling all the conditions. 
In the beginning of things, it seems, there 
existed a condition known as the “balance 
of animate Nature,” when the bird fed on 
the bug and the bug led a precarious exist¬ 
ence in the primeval foliage. Little Brother 
Quail, for example, had a menu that in¬ 
cluded 145 different species of notorious in¬ 
sects. Since then man has upset this bal¬ 
ance ; he has killed off the birds. Between 
1840 and 1910 eleven species of valuable 
wild life were totally exterminated in the 
States. Twenty-five others are being slowly 
put down into oblivion. Meanwhile the 
pests waxed fat and in their time were 
mourned by countless descendents. 
It is another example of what happens 
to man when he “monkeys” with Nature. 
And, of course, man pays the price. In 
the United States he is separated annually 
Tmain street^ 
[by JOYCE RILMEKI 
I like to look at the blossomy track of 
the moon upon the sea, 
But it isn’t half so fine a sight as Main 
Street used to be 
When it all was covered over with a 
couple of feet of snow, 
And over the crisp and radiant road 
the ringing sleighs would go. 
Now, Main Street bordered with au¬ 
tumn leaves, it was a pleasant 
thing, 
And its gutters were gay with dande¬ 
lions early in the Spring; 
I like to think of it white with frost 
or dusty in the heat, 
Because I think it is humaner than 
any other street. 
A city street that is busy and wide is 
ground by a million wheels, 
And a burden of traffic on its breast is 
all it ever feels. 
It is dully conscious of weight and 
speed and of work that never 
ends, 
But it cannot be human like Main 
Street, and recognize its friends. 
There were only about a hundred 
teams on Main Street in a day, 
And twenty or thirty people I guess, 
and some children out to play. 
And there wasn’t a wagon or buggy, 
or a man or a girl or a boy 
That Main Street didn’t remember, 
and somehow seem to enjoy. 
from the sum of $8,000,000 
for spraying machines, spray¬ 
ing mixtures and deadly pow¬ 
ders, and if he figured out the 
damage pests do he would 
find that it totals just about 
$500,000,000 per year. Truly the sins of 
our fathers must have been great. 
But there is a way to lighten the burden, 
and by degrees the country folk are finding 
out. Restore the balance by saving the bird. 
If you can help a robin, help him, for he 
is industrious. If you can save a grosbeak, 
save him, for he consumes potato bugs and 
sings gaily while he does it. But best of 
all save the bob-whites, for they labor 
eighteen hours a day at the pests, and when 
the pests are all eaten up, they take for 
dessert no less than 129 various weed seeds. 
L AST summer a friend of mine took 
a slum lad to the country. The lad 
was a freshman in college, a city-starved, 
book-fed, pale-faced Jew who burned with 
the zeal of a great ambition. He had never 
been to the country. So a berth was made 
for him up under the eaves and he came to 
stay the summer through—brought his 
books and his notes to study, and a pair of 
white flannels, and two soft shirts and a 
flamboyant tie. . . . The third day he 
left. Couldn't stand it. The air was too 
pure for him and the nights too quiet. He 
was consumed with homesickness for the 
asphalt pavements, the canned food, the 
barrack tenement and the thunder of the 
city’s streets from dawn to dawn. 
The lad didn’t stay long enough—that 
was all. For you can't plunge into country 
life. It is a progress by degrees. Three 
days and one is only beginning to get enough 
sleep. On the fourth he starts to be recon¬ 
ciled. And once reconciled he will never 
forget the country’s inextinguishable joy 
and unmeasured freedom. 
It takes no more effort than the exercise 
of the will to free oneself from the obvious 
shackles of a city. A subtler influence has 
to work to drive out those little habits that 
the city breeds; most of all the noise habit. 
If you are busy you rarely hear the noise 
in a city; and therefore the way to shut it 
out is to work, work interminably, intensely. 
But in the country you work as the mood 
comes, and the sounds are music to the 
ear because you love them. 
Chesterton wrote a line that I always 
think of when I look upon contented city 
folk. It goes something like this: 
“Their doors are always closed in the 
evening; they have no songs.” 
The truck and the motor and trolley 
car and the elevated train 
They make the weary city street re¬ 
verberate with pain: 
But there is yet an echo left down 
deep within my heart 
Of the music the Main Street cobbles 
made beneath a butcher’s cart. 
God be thanked for the Milky Way 
that runs across the sky! 
That’s the path that my feet would 
tread whenever I have to die. 
Some folks call it a Silver Sword, and 
some a Pearly Crown, 
But the only thing I think it is, is 
Main Street, Heaventown. 
