the season
every day, and why should not the eye be educated and nourished by an
equal variety?

We are all very much interested in your flower-holders of natural wood,
and I will offer you an idea in exchange, after the truly cooeperative
Garden, You, and I plan. In the flower season, instead of using your
embroidered centrepieces for the table, which become easily stained and
defaced by having flowers laid upon them, make several artistic table
centres of looking-glass, bark, moss, or a combination of all three.

Lavinia Cortright and I, as a beginning, have oval mirrors of about
eighteen inches in length, with invisibly narrow nickel bindings.
Sometimes we use these with merely an edge of flowers or leaves and a
crystal basket or other low arrangement of flowers in the centre. The
glass is only a beginning, other combinations being a birch-bark mat,
several inches wider than the glass, that may be used under it so that a
wide border shows, or the mat by itself as a background for delicate
wood flowers and ferns. A third mat I have made of stout cardboard and
covered with lichens, reindeer moss, and bits of mossy bark, and I never
go to the woods but what I see a score of things that fairly thrust
themselves before me and offer to blend with one of these backgrounds,
and by holding the eye help to render meal-times less "foody," as Sukey
Latham puts it, though none the less nourishing.

Last night when we gathered at dinner, a few moments after our arrival
and our first meeting at this cottage, I at once became aware that
though host and hostess were the same delightful couple, we were not
dining at Meadow's End, their Oaklands cottage, but at Gray Rocks, with
silver sea instead of green grass below the windows. While the sea
surroundings were brought indoors and on the centre of the dinner table
the mirror was edged by a border of sea-sand, glistening pebbles and
little shells were arranged as a background instead of mosses and
lichens, and rich brown seaweeds still moist with the astringent tonic
sea breath edged this frame, and the more delicate rose-coloured and
pale green weeds seemed floating upon the glass, that held a giant
periwinkle shell filled with the pink star-shaped sabbatia, or sea pink,
of the near-by salt marshes. There was no effort, no strain after
effect, but a consistent preparation of the eye for the simple meal of
sea food that followed.

In front of the cottage the rocks slope quickly to t