I also supplied the inns with peas, cauliflowers, and tomatoes. Thus the farm was actually paying me in cash or saving at least $1,000 a year--indeed, much more, since we had no fruit nor vegetable bills the year through, Mrs. Pillig being an artist in preserving what would not keep in the cellar. But we will call it $1,000, and let the rest go as interest on the investment represented by seeds and implements. To offset this, I paid Mike $600 a year, and employed his son Joe at $1.75 a day, for twenty weeks. This left me a profit of about $200 on my first full season at Twin Fires, which paid my taxes and bought my coal. Out of my salary, then, came no rent, no bills for b.u.t.ter, eggs, milk, poultry, nor vegetables. I had to pay Mrs. Pillig her $20 a month therefrom, I had to pay the upkeep of the place, and grocery and meat bills (the latter being comparatively small in summer). But with the great item of rent eliminated, and my farm help paying for itself, it was astonishing to me to contemplate what a beautiful, comfortable home we were able to afford on an income which in New York would coop us in an Upper West Side apartment. We had thirty acres of beautiful land, we had a brook, a pine grove, an orchard, a not too formal garden, a lovely house in which we were slowly a.s.sembling mahogany furniture which fitted it. We had summer society as sophisticated as we cared to mix with, and winter society to which we could give gladly of our own stores of knowledge or enthusiasm and find joy in the giving. We had health as never before, and air and sunshine and a world of beauty all about us to the far blue wall of hills.
Above all, we had the perpetual incentive of gardening to keep our eyes toward the future. A true garden, like a life well lived, is forever becoming, forever in process, forever leading on toward new goals. Life, indeed, goes hand in hand with your garden, and never a fair thought but you write it in flowers, never a beautiful picture but you paint it if you can, and with the striving learn patience, and with the half accomplishment, the "divine unrest."
Horas Non Numero Nisi Serenas
reads the ancient motto on our dial plate, and as I look back on the years of Twin Fires" genesis, or forward into the future, the hours that are not sunny are indeed not marked for me. I am writing now at a table beneath the pergola. The floor is of brick, laid (somewhat irregularly) by Stella and me, for we still are poor, as the Eckstroms would reckon poverty, and none of what Mrs. Deland has called "the grim inhibitions of wealth" prevents us from doing whatever we can with our own hands, and finding therein a double satisfaction. Over my head rustle the thick vines--a wistaria among them, which may or may not survive another winter.
It is June again. The ghost of Rome in roses is marching across the lawn beyond the white sundial, and there are arches in perspective now beneath the level superstructure. The little brick bird bath is covered with ivy, and last year"s self-sown double Emperor Williams are already blue about it. The lawn is a thick, rich green. To the west the grape arbour rises above a white bench of real marble, and I can see dappled shadows beneath the whitish young leaves. I know that around the pool stately j.a.panese iris are budding now, great clumps of them revelling in the moisture they so dearly love, soon to break into blooms as large as plates, and beyond them is a little lawn, with the bench our own hands made against a clump of cedars, and on each side a small statue of marble on a slender chestnut pedestal, carved and painted to balance the bench.
I know also that a path now wanders up the brook almost to the road, amid the wild tangle, and ends suddenly in the most unexpected nook beneath a willow tree, where irises fringe a second tiny pool. I know that the path still wanders the other way into the pines--pines larger now and more murmurous of the sea--past beds of ferns and a lone cardinal flower that will bloom in a shaft of sunlight. Somewhere down that path my wife is wandering, and she is not alone. A little form (at least she says it has form!) sleeps beside her, while she sits, perhaps, with a book or more likely with sewing in her busy fingers, or more likely still with hands that stray toward the sleeping child and ears that listen to the sea-sh.e.l.l murmur of the pines whispering secrets of the future. Is he to be a Napoleon or a Pasteur? No less a genius, surely, the prophetic pines whisper to the listening mother!
My own pen halts in its progress and the ink dries on the point.
Horas Non Numero Nisi Serenas
--that indeed we desire for our children, for our loved ones! Dim, forgotten perils of adolescence come to my mind, as a cloud obscures the summer sun. Then the cloud sweeps by. I see the white dial post focussing the sunlight once again on the green lawn, amid its ring of stately queens, and the thought comes over me not that I possess these thirty acres of Twin Fires, but that they possess me, that they are mine only in trust to do their bidding, to hand them on still fairer than I found them to the new generation of my stock. They are the Upton home--forever.
Already we have bought a tall grandfather"s clock, with little Nat"s name and birth date on a plate inside the door. I can hear it ticking somnolently now, out in the hall. Already the quaint rubbish is acc.u.mulating in our attic which in twenty years will be a dusty, historical record of many things, from sartorial styles to literary fashions. Some day little Nat will rummage them for forgotten books of his childhood, and come upon my derby, now in the latest fashion, to wonder that men ever wore such outlandish headgear.
But the garden will never be out of fashion! Looking forth again from the window, I can see our best discovery of last season beginning to scatter its bits of sky on the ground, as it does every day before noon.
It is flax, which blooms every day at sunrise the season through, sheds all its petals when the sun is high, and renews them all with the next day"s dew. It is perfectly hardy and reproduces itself in great quant.i.ty. No blue is quite like it save the sky, and at seven o"clock of a fresh June morning you will go many a mile before you find anything so lovely as our garden borders. A little later, too, the first sowing of our schyzanthus will begin to flower, against a backing of white platycodons, and that will be an old-fashioned feature of delicate bloom perpetually new, for the little b.u.t.terfly flower, as it used to be called, covering the entire graceful plant with orchidlike blossoms, is one of those shyer effects that the professional gardeners never strive for, but which we amateurs who are poor enough to be our own gardeners achieve, to put the great expensive formal gardens to shame.
Another bed we are proud of is filled with love-in-a-mist rising out of sweet alyssum--all feathery blue and white, like our own skies.
But we, too, have the showier effects. Already the best of them is coming--about a hundred feet of larkspur along the west wall of the garden, and at its base pink Canterbury bells. Unfortunately, the bells will be pa.s.sing as the larkspur comes to its fullest flower, but for about four or five days in ordinary seasons that particular border of pink and blue is a rare delight.
I wonder, by the way, if Stella has watered the schyzanthus plants this morning. They are down in the borders by the pool. Perhaps I had better go and see. A moment"s respite from my toil will do me good. I will listen to the tinkle of the brook, as I will follow the path that wanders beside it through the maples to the pines, where our garden is but the reproduction in little of our fair New England woods. At the spot where first we heard the hermit sing I shall find my wife and child, I shall find them for whom all my strivings are, who give meaning to my life, who, when all is said, are the sunshine of its serene hours.
What a blue sky overhead where the cloud ships ride! What a burst of song from the oriole! What a pleasant sound from the field beyond the roses--the soft chip of Mike"s hoe between the onions! And hark, from the pines a tiny cry! Can he want his father?
THE END
STORIES OF RARE CHARM BY GENE STRATTON-PORTER
May be had wherever books are sold. Ask for Grosset & Dunlap"s list
LADDIE. Ill.u.s.trated by Herman Pfeifer.
This is a bright, cheery tale with the scenes laid in Indiana. The story is told by Little Sister, the youngest member of a large family, but it is concerned not so much with childish doings as with the love affairs of older members of the family. Chief among them is that of Laddie, the older brother whom Little Sister adores, and the Princess, an English girl who has come to live in the neighborhood and about whose family there hangs a mystery. There is a wedding midway in the book and a double wedding at the close.
THE HARVESTER. Ill.u.s.trated by W. L. Jacobs.
"The Harvester," David Langston, is a man of the woods and fields, who draws his living from the prodigal hand of Mother Nature herself.
If the book had nothing in it but the splendid figure of this man it would be notable. But when the Girl comes to his "Medicine Woods," and the Harvester"s whole being realizes that this is the highest point of life which has come to him--there begins a romance of the rarest idyllic quality.
FRECKLES. Decorations by E. Stetson Crawford.
Freckles is a nameless waif when the tale opens, but the way in which he takes hold of life; the nature friendships he forms in the great Limberlost Swamp; the manner in which everyone who meets him succ.u.mbs to the charm of his engaging personality; and his love-story with "The Angel" are full of real sentiment.
A GIRL OF THE LIMBERLOST. Ill.u.s.trated by Wladyslaw T. Brenda.
The story of a girl of the Michigan woods; a buoyant, lovable type of the self-reliant American. Her philosophy is one of love and kindness towards all things; her hope is never dimmed. And by the sheer beauty of her soul, and the purity of her vision, she wins from barren and unpromising surroundings those rewards of high courage.
AT THE FOOT OF THE RAINBOW. Ill.u.s.trations in colors by Oliver Kemp.
The scene of this charming love story is laid in Central Indiana. The story is one of devoted friendship, and tender self-sacrificing love.
The novel is brimful of the most beautiful word painting of nature, and its pathos and tender sentiment will endear it to all.
Grosset & Dunlap, 526 West 26th St., New York
MYRTLE REED"S NOVELS
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LAVENDER AND OLD LACE.
A charming story of a quaint corner of New England where bygone romance finds a modern parallel. The story centers round the coming of love to the young people on the staff of a newspaper--and it is one of the prettiest, sweetest and quaintest of old fashioned love stories, * * * a rare book, exquisite in spirit and conception, full of delicate fancy, of tenderness, of delightful humor and spontaneity.
A SPINNER IN THE SUN.
Miss Myrtle Reed may always be depended upon to write a story in which poetry, charm, tenderness and humor are combined into a clever and entertaining book. Her characters are delightful and she always displays a quaint humor of expression and a quiet feeling of pathos which give a touch of active realism to all her writings. In "A Spinner in the Sun"
she tells an old-fashioned love story, of a veiled lady who lives in solitude and whose features her neighbors have never seen. There is a mystery at the heart of the book that throws over it the glamour of romance.
THE MASTER"S VIOLIN.
A love story in a musical atmosphere. A picturesque, old German virtuoso is the reverent possessor of a genuine "Cremona." He consents to take for his pupil a handsome youth who proves to have an apt.i.tude for technique, but not the soul of an artist. The youth has led the happy, careless life of a modern, well-to-do young American and he cannot, with his meagre past, express the love, the pa.s.sion and the tragedies of life and all its happy phases as can the master who has lived life in all its fulness. But a girl comes into his life--a beautiful bit of human driftwood that his aunt had taken into her heart and home, and through his pa.s.sionate love for her, he learns the lessons that life has to give--and his soul awakes.
Founded on a fact that all artists realize.
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KATE DOUGLAS WIGGIN"S STORIES OF PURE DELIGHT
Full of originality and humor, kindliness and cheer
THE OLD PEABODY PEW. Large Octavo. Decorative text pages, printed in two colors.
Ill.u.s.trations by Alice Barber Stephens.
One of the prettiest romances that has ever come from this author"s pen is made to bloom on Christmas Eve in the sweet freshness of an old New England meeting house.