House and Garden 
A SHELTERED DOORWAY OF THE WENTWORTH HOUSE 
if not more productive. As a matter of fact 
a well kept kitchen-garden properly laid out 
is just about as interesting as a flower garden, 
and there is no reason why one shouldn’t 
have flowers in the kitchen-garden too. If 
you have the dwarf fruits, you have a garden 
which can hold its own well with the flower 
garden and is a most fit and proper adjunct to 
a house which is really nothing but a little 
farmhouse. 
In simplicity of sentiment the old Went¬ 
worth house stands in closer relation to the 
farmhouse than it does to the finer houses of 
the town, which were its contemporaries. It 
is true it has a fine room, the banqueting hall, 
a parlor, which is on quite a different scale 
from the farmhouse parlor, yet it is what I 
may call countrified. It is not fashionably 
classic in its plan, which is rambling and un¬ 
balanced and its detail is simple, almost naive. 
Like the cottage, the governor’s old summer 
place had passed through a state of decayed 
gentility, much neglected, dirty and ill-cared 
for, but yet showing unmistakable marks of 
its past, and retaining the chief features of its 
architecture unchanged, it stood a somewhat 
sad reminder of former dignity. Fortunately 
it fell into the hands of one who cared for its 
past, and for its many homely beauties of the 
present, and it is now as attractive as in its 
palmiest days, even though no governor’s 
guard stack arms in the vestibule and no 
Colonial bloods feast in the banqueting room 
or play in the card rooms. The house is 
unlike any other of that period that I know of. 
It seems to have been built or put together 
at various times without a trace of the formal 
arrangement of rooms which was even then 
an accepted method of planning everywhere 
in the colonies. I fancy there was never 
much careful gardening about this old house; 
it seems to have been more like a country 
villa for occasional outings than a country 
home, and the Wentworths had fine gardens 
at their town house, only two miles off. But 
the little enclosed spot, where now lilies and 
roses bloom, might well have been meant 
originally for a door-yard garden, and the 
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