's "People's Institute," of whose home-garden work
I have much to say in the chapters that follow this one. For forty years
or more this factory has been known far and wide as the "Hoe Shop"
because it makes shovels. It has never made hoes. It uses water-power,
and the beautiful mill-pond behind its high dam keeps the river full
back to the rapids just above my own acre. In winter this is the
favorite skating-pond of the town and of Smith College. In the greener
seasons of college terms the girls constantly pass upstream and down in
their pretty rowboats and canoes, making a charming effect as seen from
my lawn's rear edge at the head of the pine and oak shaded ravine whose
fish-pools are gay by turns with elder, wild sunflower, sumach, iris,
water-lilies, and forget-me-not.

[Illustration: "The beautiful mill-pond behind its high dam keeps the
river full back to the rapids just above My Own Acre."

This is the "Hoe Shop." The tower was ruined by fire many years ago, and
because of its unsafety is being taken down at the present writing.]

This ravine, the middle one of the grove's three, is about a hundred
feet wide. When I first began to venture the human touch in it, it
afforded no open spot level enough to hold a camp-stool. From the lawn
above to the river road below, the distance is three hundred and thirty
feet, and the fall, of fifty-five feet, is mostly at the upper end,
which is therefore too steep, as well as too full of varied undergrowth,
for any going but climbing. In the next ravine on its left there was a
clear, cold spring and in the one on its right ran a natural rivulet
that trickled even in August; but this middle ravine was dry or merely
moist.

Here let me say to any who would try an amateur landscape art on their
own acre at the edge of a growing town, that the town's growth tends
steadily to diminish the amount of their landscape's natural water
supply by catching on street pavements and scores and hundreds of roofs,
lawns and walks, and carrying away in sewers, the rain and melting snows
which for ages filtered slowly through the soil. Small wonder, I think,
that, when in the square quarter-mile between my acre and Elm Street
fifty-three dwellings and three short streets took the place of an old
farm, my grove, by sheer water famine, lost several of its giant pines.
Wonder to me is that the harm seems at length to have ceased.

But about that ravine: one day the nature of its growth and soil