and Sylvia Bradford, last year built a tiny shore cottage, three miles
up the coast, at Gray Rocks, where they are going for alternate weeks or
days as the mood seizes them, and they mean to try experiments with real
seashore gardening, while Evan proposes that we should combine pleasure
with business in a way to make frequent vacations possible and take
driving trips together to many lovely gardens both large and small, to
our mutual benefit, his eyes being open to construction and landscape
effect, and mine to the soul of the garden, as it were; for he is
pleased to say that a woman can grasp and translate this more easily and
fully than a man. What if the records of The Garden, You, and I should
turn into a real book, an humble shadow of "Six of Spades" of jovial
memory! Is it possible that I am about to be seized with Agamemnon
Peterkin's ambition to write a book to make the world wise? Alas, poor
Agamemnon! When he had searched the woods for an oak gall to make ink,
gone to the post-office, after hours, to buy a sheet of paper, and
caused a commotion in the neighbourhood and rumour of thieves by going
to the poultry yard with a lantern to pluck a fresh goose quill for a
pen, he found that he had nothing to say, and paused--thereby, at least,
proving his own wisdom.

I'm afraid I ramble too much to be a good recording secretary, but this
habit belongs to my very own garden books that no critical eyes can see.
That reminds me! Father says that he met Bartram Penrose in town last
week and that he seemed rather nervous and tired, and worried about
nothing, and wanted advice. After looking him over a bit, father told
him that all he needed was a long vacation from keeping train, as well
as many other kinds of time, for it seems during the six years of his
marriage he has had no real vacation but his honeymoon.

Mary Penrose's mother, my mother, and Lavinia Cortright were all school