HOUSE AND GARDEN 
July, 
I 9 I 4 
at Land’s End tell how their grandfathers said it was a gnarled 
old tree when they were youngsters. A hundred years of Atlantic 
storms had buffeted it, high tides had barnacled the roots and 
trunk, still it grew taller and more burly. Its huge body was 
massed with bumps like the growths which come to a disfigured 
old age, still it was lusty as in the days of its youth. 
“One spring morning,” said the artist-architect, “I wandered 
about the shore front searching for 
a site which would fit a bungalow I 
had designed. I paused for a mo¬ 
ment beside the old spruce—indeed, 
I seldom pass it without the sort of 
obeisance one pays to old age. Peo¬ 
ple from the village had been urging 
me to cut it down. 
“ ‘Make firewood of it,’ suggested 
a sacrilegist who was with me. ‘It 
is a disfigurement to the beach.’ 
“ ‘Never,’ I cried. ‘It is the most 
wonderful tree on Land’s End.’ 
“Then came an inspiration. I de¬ 
termined to build a cottage about it. 
I did not suggest that to the sacri¬ 
legist. He went off and ran up an 
ugly yellow bungalow in the woods.” 
The artist-architect went about his 
work, planning summer homes, pre¬ 
paring sites, clearing off brush, 
planting or fencing, but all the time 
his thoughts dwelt with the cottage 
which was to be shadowed by a 
spruce. It could not be a lordly cot¬ 
tage, that would dwarf the beach 
monarch. Before a pick was laid 
on its foundation the bungalow was built in his mind. He saw 
its shingled walls, its lovely curve of roof tree, its chimney of 
field stone as gray as the spruce trunk, and its piazza with a sup¬ 
port of unbarked tree trunks. 
“Touch it up with green,” suggested the sacrilegist. 
“I could not do that,” answered the artist-architect. “There 
is green enough in the foliage of the old spruce. The cottage 
should be colored like a nest in a tree.” 
The sacrilegist went away. He could not make the artist un¬ 
derstand his idea of a home. 
The artist-architect began to search for a name which would 
suit the morsel of a home to be built under the tree shadow. 
One day on a mantel shelf he saw an odd-shaped vase on which 
two lover-like penguins were painted. Immediately he had a 
Like its namesake, the Penguin is a study in gray and sits firmly upon the rocks. 
The front verandah curves gently around the trunk of the overspreading spruce tree 
motif for the tiny house. Straightway it grew and grew with 
characteristics about it which make it different from any sum¬ 
mer home you ever saw. 
The artist had been all over the world, he had spent eight 
winters in the Arctic circle, and he remembered a strange parade 
of black and white creatures which seem to bear no relation to 
anything in the bird world. 
“Why,” I asked him once, “should a penguin suggest a cot¬ 
tage?” 
“It is not like a cottage,” he answered slowly. “At least it is 
not like any cottage I ever saw. The Penguin is not common¬ 
place. One could not build a commonplace cottage about the old 
spruce. The penguin makes for stability. It is fixed to earth 
and does not go flying here and there. I set this little place firmly 
upon the rocks. The Penguin is unassuming in its plumage, a 
study in gray, as it were. The penguin obtains its food from the 
beach and the sea, as my tenants do from waters of the harbor 
and the clam flats.” 
Suddenly I understood what was in the mind of the artist while 
he built our summer home. 
The penguin himself, a royal penguin, greeted us when we 
approached the back of the house, for you go around this cot¬ 
tage to enter the back door. Pie is a stately bird, perching upon 
a narrow stone shelf which juts from the back of the chimney. 
There he sits in inscrutable calm during fog or rain or sun¬ 
shine, turning his face toward the frozen world where dwell his 
kinfolk. It is strange how uncannily alive he looks through a 
fog or in the moonlight, although his body is nothing but a wave- 
smoother boulder, a handful of clay from the clam flats, and 
he was plumaged by the brush of the artist 
The front yard of the Penguin is a quiet cove in the harbor. 
Our piazza curves like a bay window as it circles around the 
thick-trunked spruce. Its half-dozen steps lead to a rock ledge 
and the tide line of drifted, tawny weed. A boat moored by 
scarcely rose or fell, for there was not a ripple in the outgoing 
tide. Beyond the kitchen door, under its curious lantern on 
which a penguin is etched, a hay field swept till it met a stone 
dyke over which wild roses trailed. Beyond the blueberry pas- 
(Continued on page 48) 
Dull blues and greens gleam in the firelight on the narrow plate-shelf; the silvery brown of outdoors reap¬ 
pears in the simple furniture, and along the hem of the burlap portieres moves a stately procession 
of penguins like tiny men in dress clothes 
