st and of a gardening art--or
non-art, a submission which only in the outdoor embellishment of the
home takes winter supinely, abjectly.

This garden of a hope's dream covers but three ordinary town lots. Often
it shrinks to but one without asking for any notable change of plan.
Following all the lines, the hard, law lines, that divide it from its
neighbors and the street, there runs, waist-high on its street front,
shoulder-high on its side bounds, a close evergreen hedge of hemlock
spruce. In its young way this hedge has been handsome from infancy;
though still but a few years old it gives, the twelvemonth round, a note
both virile and refined in color, texture and form, and if the art that
planted it and the care that keeps it do not decay neither need the
hedge for a century to come. Against the intensest cold this side of
Labrador it is perfectly hardy, is trimmed with a sloping top to shed
snows whose weight might mutilate it, and can be kept in repair from
generation to generation, like the house's plumbing or roof, or like
some green-uniformed pet regiment with ranks yet full after the last of
its first members has perished.

Furthermore, along the inner side of this green hedge (sometimes close
against it, sometimes with a turfed alley between), as well as all round
about the house, extend borders of deciduous shrubs, with such
meandering boundaries next the broad white lawn as the present writer,
for this time, has probably extolled enough. These bare, gray shrub
masses are not wholly bare or gray and have other and most pleasingly
visible advantages over unplanted, pallid vacancy, others besides the
mere lace-work of their twigs and the occasional tenderness of a last
summer's bird's nest. Here and there, breaking the cold monotone, a bush
of moose maple shows the white-streaked green of its bare stems and
sprays, or cornus or willow gives a soft glow of red, purple or yellow.
Only here and there, insists my dream, lest when winter at length gives
way to the "rosy time of the year" their large and rustic gentleness
mar the nuptial revels of summer's returned aristocracy. Because,
moreover, there is a far stronger effect of life, home and cheer from
the broad-leaved evergreens which, in duly limited numbers, assemble
with and behind these, and from the lither sorts of conifers that spire
out of the network and haze of living things in winter sleep. The
plantings at the garden's and dwelling's front being prop