of it--another! Ah! it was a hedge, a box
hedge! Here were the great stone steps leading up to the gate, and here
the old, square capped fence-posts, once trim and white, now sunken and
silver-gray. The rest of the fence was lying among the grasses and
goldenrod, but the box still lived, dead at the top, its leafless
branches matted into a hoary gray tangle, but springing up from below in
crisp green sprays, lustrous and fragrant as ever, and richly suggestive
of the past that produced it. For the box implies not merely human life,
but human life on a certain scale: leisurely, decorous, well-considered.
It implies faith in an established order and an assured future. A
beautiful box hedge is not planned for immediate enjoyment; it is built
up inch by inch through the years, a legacy to one's heirs.

Beside the gate-posts stood what must once have been two pillars of box.
As I passed between them my feet felt beneath the matted weeds of many
seasons the broad stones of the old flagged walk that led up through the
garden to the house. Following it, I found, not the house, but the wide
stone blocks of the old doorsteps, and beyond these, a ruin--gray ashes
and blackened brick, two great heaps of stone where the chimneys had
been, with the stone slabs that lined the fireplaces fallen together. At
one end was the deep stone cellar filled now with young beeches as tall
as the house once was. Just outside stood two cherry trees close to the
old house wall--so close that they had burned with it and now stood,
black and bare and gaunt, in silent comradeship. At the other end I
almost stumbled into the old well, dark and still, with a glimmer of sky
at the bottom.

But I did not like the ruin, nor the black well lurking in the weeds and
ashes. The garden was better, and I went back to it and followed the
stone path as it turned past the end of the house and led, under another
broad hedge of box now choked by lusty young maples, to the old
rose-garden. Beyond were giant lilacs, and groups of waxberry bushes
covered with the pretty white balls that children love to string; there
was the old-fashioned "burning-bush," already preparing its queer,
angled berries for autumn splendors. And among these, still holding
their own in the tangle, clumps of the tall, rose-lilac phloxes that
the old people seem specially to have loved, swayed in the light breeze
and filled the place with their heavy, languorous fragrance.

Truly, it is a love