arry calls it, the clean white bark in the process.

Then Bart went to work with augur and round chisel, and bored and
chipped out the holes for the glass tubes, incidentally breaking two
glasses before we had comfortably settled the four, for they must fit
snugly enough not to wiggle and tip, and yet not so tight as to bind and
prevent removal for cleaning purposes. This little stand of natural wood
was no sooner finished and mounted on the camp table than its
possibilities began to crowd around it. Ferns being the nearest at hand,
I crawled over the crumbling bank wall into the Opal Farm meadow and
gathered hay-scented, wood, and lady ferns from along the fence line and
grouped them loosely in the stand. The effect was magical, a bit of its
haunt following the fern indoors.

Next day I gathered in the hemlock woods a basket of the waxy,
spotted-leaved pipsissewa, together with spikes and garlands of club
moss. I had thought these perfect when steadied by bog moss in a flat,
cut-glass dish, but in the birch stump they were entirely at home. If
these midsummer wood flowers harmonize so well, how much more charming
will be the blossoms of early spring, a season when the white birch is
quite the most conspicuous tree in the landscape! Picture dog-tooth
violets, spring beauties, bellwort, Quaker-ladies, and great tufts of
violets, shading from white to deepest blue, in such a setting! Or, of
garden things, poets' narcissus and lilies-of-the-valley!

Other receptacles of a like kind we have in different stages of
progress, made of the wood of sassafras, oak, beech, and hackberry,
together with several irregular stumps of lichen-covered cedar. Two long
limbs with several short side branches Bart has flattened on the back
and arranged with picture-hooks, so that they can be bracketed against
the frame of the living-room door, opposite the flower-greeting table
that I have fashioned after yours. These are to be used for vines, and I
shall try to keep this wide, open portal cheerfully garlanded.

The first week of my flower wardenship was a most strenuous one. I use
the word reluctantly, but having tried half a dozen others, no
equivalent seemed to fit. I had flowers in every room in the house,
bedchambers included, using in this connection the cleanest-breathed and
longest-lived blossoms possible.

Late as was the sowing, the annuals remaining in the seed bed have begun
to yield a glorious crop. The fireplaces were filled