cheme is at the southeasterly side
entrance of the house. To this the drive comes on unrigorous lines from
the street. The walk curves away a few steps earlier to go to the front
door but the drive, passing on, swings in under the rear corner windows
and to the kitchen steps, veers around by the carriage-house door and so
loops back into itself. In this loop, and all about the bases of the
dwelling and carriage-house the flowers rise in dense abundance, related
to one another with clever taste and with a happy care for a procession
of bloom uninterrupted throughout the season. Straightaway from the side
door, leaving the drive at a right angle, runs a short arbor of vines.
Four or five steps to the left of this bower a clump of shrubbery veils
the view from the street and in between shrubs and arbor lies a small
pool of water flowers and goldfish. On the arbor's right, in charming
privacy, masked by hollyhocks, dahlias and other tall-maidenly things,
lie beds of strawberries and lettuce and all the prim ranks and orders
of the kitchen garden.

Words are poor things to paint with; I wish I could set forth all in
one clear picture: lawn, drive, house, loop, lily pond, bower,
rose-bordered drive again (as the eye comes back) and flowers crowding
before, behind and beside you, some following clear out to the street
and beseeching you not to go so soon. Such is the garden, kept without
hired labor, of two soft-handed women; not beyond criticism in any of
its aspects but bearing witness to their love of nature, of beauty and
of home and of their wisdom and skill to exalt and refine them.

This competitor early won, I say, a leading prize, and in later seasons
easily held--still holds--a fine pre-eminence. Yet the later prizes fell
to others, because, while this one had been a beautiful garden for years
before the competition began, they, rising from much newer and humbler
beginnings, sometimes from very chaos, showed between one season and the
next far greater advances _toward_ artistic excellence. In the very next
year a high prize fell to a garden in full sight of this one, a garden
whose makers had caught their inspiration from this one, and, copying
its art, had brought forth a charming result out of what our judges
described as "particularly forlorn conditions."

Does this seem hardly fair to the first garden? But to spread the
gardening contagion and to instigate a wise copying after the right
gardeners--these are wha