76 
House & Garden 
Reproduction from photograph showing 
Cornell underground system in operation 
WATER SUPPLY AND 
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On House & Garden’s Book Shelf 
(Continued from page 74) 
of Miss Cyriax, contributes the preface, 
wherein he writes particularly of her 
illustrations accompanying the text. “If 
we consider how well we know in ad¬ 
vance what an artist means by his 
sketches of Italy, we must confess when 
these pages have been well studied, how 
little we could have anticipated the 
drawings of Miss Cyriax. In place of 
the well-thumbed repository most of us 
find it, her Italy is a vivid, hard, strange 
new place, peopled by workmen and 
peasants, who have a fascination about 
them that the picturesque could never 
give. They are a living people, who go 
about their tasks quite oblivious of this 
foreigner among them, who must surely 
have been disembodied to seize such an 
interior as that of the group round the 
table, the unwinking eye of the lamp 
keeping company with the man turning 
over his Corriere for the hundredth 
time, too sleepy to give up, wistful to 
extract the pinch of marrow his eye 
noted some time back. How perfectly 
it gives the long-drawn-out ennui of the 
Italian peasants’ night 1 Or, ‘After the 
Funeral’ [“The Mourners”]—is it not 
perfect in its way for humor and char¬ 
acter? The quarrel which has broken 
out at last [“An Altercation”] as every¬ 
one knew it would, is expressed with the 
singleness of heart and the freshness of 
insight which we associate with only the 
great artists. It is a disarmingly small 
sketch, but it is a masterpiece of simpli¬ 
fied character, exactly right in its put¬ 
ting down. We are all yearning for the 
genuine naif. This artist is brimful of 
it. . . . There is a rare temper dis¬ 
played throughout these sketches, 
breathing a noble democracy and sym¬ 
pathy which entitles Miss Cyriax to be 
considered a new personality in art.” 
The five full page color illustrations 
and the eleven black-and-white page 
illustrations certainly display this fresh¬ 
ness of insight and are, in their way, as 
untrammeled as the best paintings by 
Gaugin. So many painters and illustra¬ 
tors of Italian subjects have seemed to 
leave out the real spirit of the people 
in attempting to depict portrayals of 
the Italians. But Miss Cyriax is com¬ 
pletely successful in sympathetically 
bringing to the surface in her drawings 
and in her writing the tone of the 
people with which her art is concerned 
in this volume. Indeed, one can well 
understand how the little Riccardo of 
these pages divined that she was molta 
simpatica. 
“Among Italian Peasants” is not a 
novel, not a story with a central plot. 
Instead, its two hundred and sixty-three 
delightful pages—not a dull one in the 
book, unless, perchance, to the reader 
who craves the hectic—carry on the 
A SUCCESSFUL 
simple narrative of the life of an English 
artist sojourning in the farmhouse of 
an Italian peasant and his wife, a nook 
on the mountain-side between the town 
below and the village above them. The 
daily routine, the hopes, fears, simple 
pleasures, the tasks, sorrows, griefs, joys, 
quarrels of the simple folk of this borgo] 
—all these things Miss Cyriax records 
in a manner to hold our attention. Here 
the character of the peasantry of young 
Italy is revealed to us without the phil¬ 
osophizing such as we find in D. H. 
Laurence’s Italian sketches, incompar¬ 
able as these latter are in their field; 
but we feel when we have put down the 
book that we have been brought close to 
the soul of these humble folk. “The 
Dance at the Inn” (Chapter II) and 
“The Police Court” (Chapter VI) are 
two of the best scenes of Italian life 
that we have. Miss Cyriax has the gift 
of seeing all sides of her characters. 
She sees clearly, as does our own Zona 
Gale, the little things that count. There 
is the contadina Rosina who follows 
through the pages, skillfully drawn, her 
virtues as well as her faults, that nice 
offsetting and balancing which, happily, 
finds some good in the worst of us, some 
“bad” (soul-saving discovery!) in the 
best of us. The inn-keeper, Nino, has, 
contrary to police regulations, broken 
the rules of permitting a dance on his 
premises. He must go to court in con¬ 
sequence. Rosina, who has enjoyed her¬ 
self at neighbor Nino’s party, now per¬ 
suades herself that Nino is a martyr, 
the object of persecution. “Besides, how 
unjust to summons the poor fellow for 
having his door open! . . . Hadn’t the 
place been empty of guests? It was 
absurd altogether. . . . The police were 
ready to take out a summons for any¬ 
thing. Madre mia, what a world it 
was! Thus argued Rosina as we walked 
down the road between the terraces of 
vines and olives and around nasty pre¬ 
cipitous corners. She had long ago for¬ 
gotten the real facts of the case, the jolly 
dance and the scuffle up- the back path. 
She was most indignant at the way 
Nino was being treated.” 
And then when evidence seemed to 
be in Nino’s favor, the perplexed magis¬ 
trate turns to the chief of police with 
a question. “For my part,” the chief of 
police answered, “I always believe what 
my men say.” Such touches as this 
of this “Main Street” of Italian coun¬ 
tryside life run through the book. In 
literary quality, “Among Italian Peas¬ 
ants” may not reach the standard of 
rhetoric one wishes, perhaps, it did, but 
its charm, its freshness and its insight 
certainly justify its publication and com¬ 
mend its reading by those who would 
know Italy. 
MALL GARDEN 
W HEN I tell you of the most suc¬ 
cessful flower garden I ever have 
seen, I mean one on Long Island 
that is a thing of beauty from the com¬ 
ing of the first snowdrop in the earliest 
spring until the blighting of the last 
hardy chrysanthemum about the first of 
December. One that even through the 
scorching midsummer is never watered 
except to stimulate exhibition blooms, 
yet is a constantly changing, lovely pic¬ 
ture. 
Can you imagine in such a spot thou¬ 
sands, literally thousands of spring 
blooming bulbs alone—daffodils, nar¬ 
cissi, lily-of-the-valley and tulips that 
remain in the ground all year, yet after 
flowering mysteriously disappear to give 
place to iris, peony, rose, and the mid¬ 
summer perennials, well termed the 
aristocrats of the garden? And before 
the last of these are gone begin the reign 
of the fall beauties, of which the dahlia 
is king and for which the grower wins 
many a blue ribbon! 
The designer of this little garden 
which occupies only the rear of a 30' 
city lot is Mrs. Elsie Tarr Smith, a 
writer as well as an authority on flow¬ 
ers, of Flushing. Here she has done 
much through the well-known Park 
Garden Club of that place, to stimulate 
interest in the cultivation of the finest 
varieties both indoors and out, and 
takes pride in growing flowers the year 
around without glass. As the front end 
of the lot is occupied by the dwelling, 
the rear is left in nearly a perfect 
square. The tiny grass plot in the mid¬ 
dle maintains that first rule of land¬ 
scape art, “Preserve open lawn centers”; 
while the graceful curves of the sur¬ 
rounding flower-beds demonstrate the 
second rule, “Avoid straight lines”; and 
for the third rule, “Plant in masses, not 
(Continued on page 78) 
