some bird half-awakened. Once
a wood thrush sang his daytime song all through, and murmured part of it
a second time, then sank into silence.

"Jonathan," I said at last, "the farm is rather a good place to be."

"Not bad."

"Let's not groom it too much. Let's not make it too shipshape. After
all, you know, it isn't really a ship."

"Nor yet a woodchuck, I hope," said Jonathan.

And I was content not to press the matter.

VIII

"Escaped from Old Gardens"

In the days when I deemed it necessary to hunt down in my well-thumbed
Gray every flower of wood and field, and fit it to its Latin name, I
used often to meet this phrase. At first, being young, I resented it. I
scorned gardens: their carefully planned and duly tended splendors were
not for me. The orchid in the deep woods or by the edge of the lonely
swamp, the rare and long-sought heather in the open moorland, these it
was that roused my ardor. And to find that some newly discovered flower
was not a wild flower at all, but merely a garden flower "escaped"! The
very word carried a hint of reprobation.

But as the years went on, the phrase gathered to itself meanings vague
and subtle. I found myself welcoming it and regarding with a warmer
interest the flower so described. From what old garden had it come? What
associations and memories did it bring out of the past? Had the paths
where it grew been obliterated by the encroachments of a ruthless
civilization, or had the tide of human life drawn away from it and left
it to be engulfed by the forest from which it had once been wrested,
with nothing left to mark it but a gnarled old lilac tree? I have
chanced upon such spots in the heart of the wood, where the lilac and
the apple tree and the old stoned cellar wall are all that are left to
testify to the human life that once centred there. Or had the garden
from which its seed was blown only fallen into a quiet decay, deserted
but not destroyed, left to bloom unchecked and untended, and fling its
seeds to the summer winds that its flowers might "escape" whither they
would?

Lately, I chanced upon such a garden. I was walking along a quiet
roadside, almost dusky beneath the shade of close-set giant maples, when
an unexpected fragrance breathed upon me. I lingered, wondering. It came
again, in a warm wave of the August breeze. I looked up at the tangled
bank beside me--surely, there was a spray of box peeping out through the
tall weeds! There was a bush