Evening Republican, Volume 20, Number 236, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 October 1916 — The IDYL of TWIN FIRES [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

The IDYL of TWIN FIRES

by WALTER PRICHARD EATON

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CHAPTER XlV—Continued. , —lfr"She holds, she bolds!'’ I cried. “But we’ve forgotten to put stones for the -water to fall over upon. It will undermine the structure If we don’t” •‘ ‘Structure’ la good,” laughed Stella, regarding our little six-foot-long and elghteen-inch-hlgh piece of engineering. We shouted for Peter, and ran to the nearest stone wall, tugging back some flat stones, which we placed directly below the dam for the overflow to fall on. Then, while Stella eat on the bank and watched the water rise, I shoveled some of the earth removed from the basin Into the now abandoned temporary channel and packed It down. “Say, we can have fish in here,” cried Petes, who was also watching the water rise. “You can have a four-legged fish.” laughed Stella, as Buster chme down the bank with a gleeful bark and went splash into the pool, emerging to shake himself and spray us all. I had scarce finished filling in the temporary trench, and was setting the poor uprooted plants back Into the bed, with my back turned, when I heard a simultaneous shout from Pteter and .goes!” cried Stella. “One, two, three —and over she Stella. I faced around Just in time to see the first line of the water crawling over the top of,the dam, and a second later it splashed on the'stones below; behind it came the waterfall. Stella was dancing up and down. 'Oh, it’s a real waterfall !” she cried. "I've got a real waterfall all my own! Come on downstream and look back at It!"

From the grove below It certainly did look pretty, flashing In the morning gun. “And when there are Iris bloslotns, great Japanese Iris, nodding ever It!” I exclaimed. “Ob, can’t we plant those right away?” she asked. “No.” said I. "Gardens are like Rome, I’m afraid.” We went back and surveyed our pool at close range. It was clearing now. But the second pile of earth remained to be removed from the west side. Peter and I carted that off In wheelbarrow* at once, dumping part of It Into the hole where we had dug the sand, and the rest Into a heap behind some bushes upstream for future compost. Then we climbed the orchard slope for dinner. Midway we looked back. There glistened our pool, a twenty-foot brown crystal mirror, with the four flower beds all askew about It, the ragged weeds and bushes pressing them close, and beyond It only the rough ground I had cleared with a brush scythe, and the scraggly trees by the wall. “Alas,” said I, “now we’ve built a pool, we’ve got to build a whole den to go with It!” “But It tinkles! Hear it tinkle!” cried Stella. We listened, hand in hand. The tiny waterfall was certainly tinkling, a cool, delicate, plashy sound, which ■tingled with the sound of the breeze In. the trees above our heads, and the sweet twitterings of birds. “Oh, John, it’s a very nice dam, and a very nice world!” she whispered, as we went through the door. “And, after all, it seems to me the greatest fun of gardening is all the nice other things It makes you want to do after you’ve done the first one.” “That,” said I sententlonsly, "is perImps the secret of all successful living.”

CHAPTER XV. The Nice Other Things. A port of water twenty feet long whining in the sun, or glimmering deeply in the twilight, that and Nothing else save a few straggling, annuals wrongly placed about It —yet it made Twin Fires over, it caused us weeks of toll, it got into our dreams, it got into our pockets, too. ' “Now I know why sunken gardens are so called,” said Stella, as she figured out the cost of the fall bulb planting we had already planned. “It's because you sink so much money In 'em!" Qt eorftse there was little that we would do to the margin of title pool that summer, but there was plenty to do beyond the margin-. The first thing of all was to place the flower beds differently. This took considerable experimenting, and Stella, being ingenious, hit upon a scheme for testing various possible arrangements. She filled all sorts of receptacle’s, from tumblers to pitchers, with cut flowers, low and high, and stood them in masses here and there, till the spot was found where they looked the best. As the p*of centered on the line between the front door of the bouse and the yet-to-be-built garden bench against the stone wall, and as the orchard came down to within forty feet of the brook on the stope from the house, it was something of a problem to lead naturally from a grassy orchard slope into a water feature and a bit of almost gardening, without making the transition stiff and abrupt We finally

solved it with the aid of a lawn mower, flower beds and imagination. Going over the grass between the last apple trees and the brook again and again with the mower, I finally reduced that section to something like a lawn, and also kept mowed a straight path from the pool up to the front door. Then, beginning just beyond the last shadows, we cut a bed, thirty Inches wide, on each side of the line of the path, running parallel with it to within ten feet of the pool; then they swung to left and right, following the curve of the bank until they flanked the pool. By planting low flowers at the beginning, and gradually Increasing their height till we had larkspur and hollyhocks and mallow In the flanking beds, we could both make the transition from orchard to water feature, and also screen off the pool. Increasing Its intimacy, without, however, hiding It from the front door, where It was glimpsed down a path of trees and flowers. Of course we had no flowers now in mld-July to put into those beds, save what few we could dig up from elsewhere, setting poor little annual phloxes two feet apart; but we could, and did, use them for seedbeds for next year’s perennials, and to the eye of faith they were beautiful.

Now we were confronted by the problem of the' other side of the pool, which Included the problem of how to get to the other side! Stblla suggested tentatively a tiny Japanese moon bridge above the pool, but I would have none of It. I “The only way to build a Japanese garden in New England Is to utilize New England features,” I Insisted. “We won’t copy anybody.” “All right,” she answered, “then we want stepping stones above the pool, and some more down below the dam, where we can see the waterfall.” “More suitable —and much easier," I agreed. Once more we robbed the stone wall, building our two flanking paths of stepping-stones to the other side of the brook. , \ On the other side we decided to eliminate all flower beds In the open, merely planting iris and forget-me-not on the rim of the pool. We would clear out a wide semicircle of lawn, with the bench at the center of the circumference, and plant our remaining flowers against the shrubbery on the sides, which was chiefly the wild reds osier dogwood (cornus stolonlfera). I got a brush scythe, a hatchet, a spade, a grub hoe and a rake, and we went to work. Work Is certainly the word. It was not difficult to clear the brush and the tall, rank weeds and grasses away from our semicircle, which was hardly more than thirty feet In diameter, but to spade up the black soil thereafter, to eliminate the long, tenacious roots of the witch grass and the weeds, to clear out the stubborn stumps of Innumerable little trees and wild shrubs which had overrun the place, to spread evenly the big pile of soil we had excavated from the pool, to reduce it all to a clean, level condition for sowing grass, was more than I had bargained for. Stella gave up helping, for it was beyond hei> strength; but I kept on, through the long, hot July afternoons, and at last had it ready. The time of year was anything but propitious for sowing grass seed, but we planted it, none the less, trusting that in such a low, moist spot it might make a catch. Then we turned to th.e bench. “Gracious, you have to be everything to be n gardener, don’t you?” Stella laughed, as we tried'to draw a sketch first,‘which should satisfy us. “The bench ought to balance the old Governor Winthrop highboy top of the front door 4 But I’m sure I don’t know how we’re going to make it” “Patience,” said I, turning the leaves of a catalogue of expensive marble garden furniture. • yust a simple design of the classic peripd will do. Colonial furnltufe was based on the Greek orders.”

We found at last the picture of a marble bench which could be duplicated in general outline with wooden planking, so I telephoned to the lumber dealer In the next town for two 24-inch-wlde chestnut planks, And was fairly staggered bv the bill When it came. It appears that a 24-lnch-wide plank nowadays has to come from North Carolina, or some other distant point, and is rarer < than charity, at least that is what they told me. “I think it would be cheaper In marble,” said Stella. “And it looks to me as if you could make the bench out of one plank.” “We want another bench on the sundial lawn,” said I, wisely. “You do now,” said she. “But if I hadn’t' got two plonks,” said I, “and had spoiled the first one, then we’d have had to wait two or three days again.” “Oh, that was the reason!” she smiled. I sawed one of the planks into one six-foot and two jwo-foot lengths, and rounded the edges of the long piece for the tpp. Then, on the two short lengths we carefully drew from the picture the outline of the supports ea

the marble original, and went to wort with rip saw, hatchet and drawknife to carve them out The seasoned chestnut worked bard, and we were half a day about oor. tuk. The next day we put the three pieces together with braces and long screws; planed and sandpapered the wood till we had it smooth, and then painted it with white enamel paint While the first coat was drying, we made a deep foundation of coal ashes and flat stones for the bench to rest on? and the next afternoon, when the second coat, which Stella had applied before breakfast was nearly dry, I hove the heavy thing on a wheelbarrow, and carted ft around the road to the point where it was to go. We put a little fresh cement on the foundation stones to hold the two legs, and with Mike’s aid the bench was lifted over the stone wall, through the hedge of ash-leaf maples, put in place, and leveled. Stella hovered near, with the can of paint, to cover our fingermarks and give the top a final glistening coat “There,” I cried, as the job was done, “we have our pool and our garden bench! We have some of our flowers planted for next year! Wo have our bit of lawn! Let's go up the orchard to the front door and see how It looks.” t I left the wheelbarrow forgotten in the road, and we ran up the slope together, turned at the door, and gazed back. The pool shimmered in the afternoon sun. We could hear the water tinkling over the dam. Beyond the pool was the dark semicircle of fresh mold that was to be green grass backed by blossoms against the shrubbery, and finally, at the very rear, now stood the white bench, from this distance gleaming like marble. “Fine! It looks fine!” I cried. Stella’s eyes were squinted judicially. “Oh, dear,” she said, “I wish there was a cedar, a tall, slender, dark cedar, just behind the bench at either

end. And, John, do you know, we ought to have some goldfish in the pool?” I sighed profoundly. “You are a real gardener,” said I. “Nothing is ever finished!” " “I’m afraid I am,” she answered. “But we will have the goldfish, won’t we?” “Yes, and the cedars, too,” I replied. “I’ll ask Mike when is the best time to put ’em In.” Mike was sure that spring was the best time, and there were some good ones up in our pasture. “Oh, dear, spring Is the best time for everything, it seems to me, and here it’s only July !” cried Stella. “Well, anyhow, I’m going to draw a plan of the pool garden, and hang it over my desk.” She got paper and pencil and drew the plan, while I lay under an orchard tree listening to the tinkle of the waterfall and watching her while Buster came and licked my face. “I think your arrangements of irla on the edge Is rather formal,” I was saying, “and It would be rather more decorous, If not decorative, for you to sit upon the bench, and —” when we heard a motor rumble over the bridge at the brook, and the engine stop by •our side door.

CHAPTER XVI. ■ Callers. “Heavens!’! cried Stella, leaping to her feet,, “do you suppose it’s callers?” She looked ruefully at her paintstained fingers, at her old, soiled khaki garden skirt, which stopped at least six inches from the ground, and then at my get-up, which consisted of a very dirty soft-collared , shlrt. no necktie, khaki trousers that beggared description, and soil-crusted boots. Some passengers from the motor were unquestionably coming up our side path—• they were coming around the corner by the lilac bush to the front door—they were around the lllae bush—they were upon us! We looked at them—at a large, ample female in a silk gown anything but sample, at a young woman elaborately dressed, at a smallish man with white hair, white mustache and ruddy complexion, clad in a juvenile Norfolk jacket and white flannels. "They are coming to call!" whjw pered Stella. "The Lord help Mt John, I’m scaredr ~ “ ' (TO BH ’CONTDOnUM

“You Have to Be Everything to Be a Gardener, Don’t You?”