landscape-gardener. Poor health had driven him out of the professions, and
the tastes of a scholar drove him away from out-door life; he had
compromised the matter by that book-store down opposite the post-office.
The literature of a Vermont town is not of the most world-stirring nature,
and it did occur to him, occasionally, that business was rather dull, but
his wife loved the old home, the children were comfortable and happy, and
he himself, he thought, was getting rather old to start out on any new
venture elsewhere; so Yorkbury seemed likely to be the family nest for
life.

It was the same methodical kind-heartedness that made him at once so
thoughtful and tender a father, and yet so habitually worried by the
children's little failings, that gave him his taste for beautiful flowers
and shrubbery, and his skill in cultivating them. This garden was his pet
enterprise. It was gracefully laid out with winding walks, evergreens,
fruit-trees and flower-beds; not in stiff patterns, but with a delightful
studied negligence, such as that with which an artist would group the
figures on a landscape. Rocks and vines and wild flowers were scattered
over the garden very much as they would be found in the fields; stately
roses and dahlias, delicate heliotrope and aristocratic fuchsias, would
grow, side by side, with daisies and buttercups. But, best of all, Gypsy
liked the corner where the golden russet stood. A bit of a brook ran
across it, which had been caught in a frolic one day, as it went singing
away to the meadows, and dammed up and paved down into a tiny pond.

The short-tufted grass swept over its edge like a fringe, and in their
season slender hair-bells bent over, casting little blue shadows into the
water; the apple-boughs, too, hung over it, and flung down their showers
of pearls and rubies, when the wind was high. Moreover, there was a
statue. This statue was Gypsy's pride and delight. It was Aladdin's