growing things they preserved, the way they planted, the life
they led, all go to prove exactly that thing. Their bush--and
vine-covered fences crept around the acres they owned in a strip
of gaudy colour; their orchard lay in a valley, a square of apple
trees in the centre widely bordered by peach, so that it appeared
at bloom time like a great pink-bordered white blanket on the
face of earth. Swale they might have drained, and would not, made
sheets of blue flag, marigold and buttercups. From the home you
could not look in any direction without seeing a picture of
beauty.

"Last spring," the author writes in a recent letter, "I went back
with my mind fully made up to buy that land at any reasonable
price, restore it to the exact condition in which I knew it as a
child, and finish my life there. I found that the house had been
burned, killing all the big trees set by my mother's hands
immediately surrounding it. The hills were shorn and ploughed
down, filling and obliterating the creeks and springs. Most of
the forest had been cut, and stood in corn. My old catalpa in the
fence corner beside the road and the Bartlett pear under which I
had my wild-flower garden were all that was left of the dooryard,
while a few gnarled apple trees remained of the orchard, which
had been reset in another place. The garden had been moved, also
the lanes; the one creek remaining out of three crossed the
meadow at the foot of the orchard. It flowed a sickly current
over a dredged bed between bare, straight banks. The whole place
seemed worse than a dilapidated graveyard to me. All my love and
ten times the money I had at command never could have put back
the face of nature as I knew it on that land."