52 
HO USE & GARDEN 
T 
HE good woman of 
the house had de¬ 
nuded her closets of spare 
blankets and sheets, and 
the garden, her pride since early spring, assumed in that dusk 
an uncanny ghostliness. Where but an hour before stood 
lordly dahlia clump and aster bed lay white clouds, as though 
the heavens had bowed down and rested there. Sure enough, 
that night the frost came—the first frost. 
“I did want the garden to last just a little longer,” was her 
explanation. One could well understand and sympathize. 
We feel differently about the end of gardening than about 
the autumnal cessation of farming. Farming is a business; 
gardening is an art. In the one we labor for a harvest; we 
work that the frosts may see our barns crowded and our cribs 
filled. There is little thought for appearances save a pride in 
the straight furrow and the well-stacked shock. In gardening 
we labor mainly for appearances, to make an ensemble of color 
and blossom. Our harvest is a memory. This garden, a 
creation of our personality and brawn, like any creation, de¬ 
serves ennobling to an art. 
Frost finds our creation complete, our labor ended. We 
have watched the metamorphosis of seed to blossom and the 
vision is attained. But ere we can tire of it falls the inexorable 
blow. An erstwhile glory is reduced to a wilderness of with¬ 
ered stalk and blackened blossom. We who have disciplined 
the soil and withheld the wayward branch that our endeavor 
bear greater fruit, know now the discipline of the frost. Per¬ 
haps it is well that these things are so. The garden is to the 
gardener, and comes hack most to him. 
THOUGHTS AT THIS SEASON 
T O far too many is Autumn one of the saddest seasons. 
In it they can see only decay and death, not realizing that 
it is the beginning of a new life. “There is, after all, no dead 
season of the year, and that period which so many regard as 
the end is the beginning—Autumn is really the first sign of 
Spring.” 
At this time comes Indian Summer, a mellow, lingering 
afterthought, a memory wraith of smokiness and haze, of 
burnished leaf and silvering bough, when by some strange 
alchemy green turns to gold and gold to the dun of winter. 
Days of warmth without heat, whose harmonies of color give 
way to grey twilights that steal morosely over the landscape. 
Not until the end of the 18th Century was this recognized 
as a separate season. Since then a dozen reasons have been 
advanced why it is called Indian Summer. The reasons, how¬ 
ever, are not half so interesting as the fact that for once we 
associate something lovely and peaceful with the Red Man. 
It was about this time of year that the Pilgrim Fathers 
found, in the arrival of a provision ship, just cause for thanks¬ 
giving—that and a vicarious gratitude for not having been com- 
■Vcpletely. wiped out by marauding Indians. Viewed in the 
, ;Tigfit of present-day comprehension, the Pilgrim Fathers should 
have thanked Heaven they were vouchsafed the opportunity 
of associating with Indians. 
We, as a people, have many sins on our conscience, but none 
is So difficult to forget as the injustice done the Red Man by 
/pv.,r.fearly settlers. Seeing in him only the lurking demon, be- 
Mcause they failed to convert him to their faith, they discounted 
.everything that was naturally beautiful and interesting in his 
character. 
W HEN the white man came to America he had little or 
nothing to fear from the Indians. They were a people 
who loved peace, and none so eloquently voiced its beau¬ 
ties as they. Their warpaths, once proverbially fearsome, we 
since have learned were nothing more than lanes of commerce, 
of friendly communication between tribe and tribe. Moreover, 
the Indian was profoundly religious and thoroughly an artist, in 
handicraft. It took, as George Sheldon, the historian of Old 
Deerfield, has observed, just about 50 years of the white man’s 
guns, rum and vice, together with the misguided efforts of a 
long line of missionaries, to undermine the native character 
and make of the Indian 
“the child of the devil.” 
A tender memory of 
the Red Man has been 
left us in a name, however, and Nature conspires in the act 
— touching hillside and hollow with the richest colors from 
her palette to make Indian Summer her crowning work. 
Even city folk come to know and understand Indian Sum¬ 
mer. They know it as the time of kindly coolness when they 
can work hard without fatigue. They understand that the 
season is changing because the city’s outer rim is swathed in 
a strange haze, because darkness makes black holes of their 
office windows where before was only the murk of dusk; 
scurrying home through crowded streets, the autumnal breeze 
brings along to them the acrid smoke from chestnut sellers’ 
fires, chrysanthemum hawkers cry their wares, newsies shout 
of football, cheeks are brushed by passing furs, and once again 
arrives the homeward hour when they can watch the city’s 
lighted towers enspangle the skirts of Night. 
L ATER comes the season of the storm doors’ resurrection 
into hideous prominence. From the oblivion of countless 
sheds and cellars they are hauled forth. One might wish 
that they be interned there forever. At best, storm doors are 
unspeakably ugly, albeit they may serve a useful purpose. A 
temporary architectural detail which seems to have been over¬ 
looked, is it not high time that either public taste were educated 
against them, or a solution sought in better design ? 
The house with a portico entrance or a vestibule stands 
some chance of looking fairly presentable in winter; all others 
are eyesores. Since the purpose of the storm door is primarily 
to act as bufifer to penetrating winds, thus conserving the heat 
of the house and reducing the coal bills, it would be fairly feas¬ 
ible to enclose the entrance with a wind break of evergreens, 
placed in temporary but sufficiently solid positions. They 
would keep green through the winter, give interest to the door, 
and take away some of that barren appearance most houses 
have at this season. 
Happily, the day may come when we shall have thrown 
off our prejudice for superheated houses, and not dread, as 
it is dreaded to-day, the leavening, wholesome, clean, chill air 
that seeps in through doors and windows. 
A previous generation suffered from uneven heating: they 
passed from torrid rooms to arctic hallways. To-day we 
suffer from too much heat. Americans who go abroad in 
winter learn this to their discomfort, for the Continental knows 
no such pampering. Racially we are given to doing things 
on a big scale — including the heating of our houses—and the 
storm door aids and encourages the habit. Why not start to re¬ 
form at the storm door? 
G LANCING through a number of poems written by English 
soldiers in the trenches, the singular fact creeps out that 
home to them is quite a different place than it would be to 
many an American. It means the hop fields, the heather- 
covered moors, a sleepy village street, a glade in Kent or a 
Surrey hilltop. Always, whether they hail from the High¬ 
lands, the Midlands or along the Cornish shore, England to 
them is the English countryside. 
The soul of England is rural, the soul of America urban. 
We sing of our “little old Broadway”; lonesome, we want to 
be remembered to Herald Square; home means to us a teem¬ 
ing city street. We are too young a race to think as the 
Briton thinks. To many of us—far too many — the country 
means a backwater life, the grave of ambition, a haven for 
business failures and physical wrecks. Blindly we believe 
that the heart of America beats in Wall Street, little knowing 
that the life blood of the nation pulses along our far-flung 
western wheat fields, in our rock-ribbed New England orchards 
and through the cotton plantations of the South. We will 
come to understand, to value and revere the country only 
as we appreciate that the heart of a people can never be a 
bank but must ever be a field. “The holy earth,” W. H. 
Bailey has called it — and holy earth it is. 
