y are
held too near the fire of the sun. If everything must be neglected and
forlorn so much the more reason there should be a fence, if but to hide
it. Americans are too fond of being stared at; they apparently feel as
if it were one's duty to one's neighbor. Even if there is nothing really
worth looking at about a house, it is still exposed to the gaze of the
passers-by. Foreigners are far more sensible than we, and the
out-of-door home life among them is something we might well try to copy.
They often have their meals served out of doors, and one can enjoy an
afternoon nap in a hammock, or can take one's work out into the shady
garden with great satisfaction, unwatched; and even a little piece of
ground can be made, if shut in and kept for the use and pleasure of the
family alone, a most charming unroofed and trellised summer ante-room to
the house. In a large, crowded town it would be selfish to conceal the
rare bits of garden, where the sight of anything green is a godsend; but
where there is the whole wide country of fields and woods within easy
reach I think there should be high walls around our gardens, and that we
lose a great deal in not making them entirely separate from the highway;
as much as we should lose in making the walls of our parlors and
dining-rooms of glass, and building the house as close to the street as
possible.

But to go back to the little front yards: we are sorry to miss them and
their tangle or orderliness of roses and larkspur and honeysuckle,
Canterbury bells and London pride, lilacs and peonies. These may all
bloom better than ever in the new beds that are cut in the turf; but
with the side fences that used to come from the corners of the house to
the front fence, other barriers, as I have said here over and over, have
been taken away, and the old-fashioned village life is becoming extinct.
People do not know what they lose when they make way with the reserve,
the separateness, the sanctity of the front yard of their grandmothers.
It is like writing down the family secrets for any one to read; it is
like having everybody call you by your first name and sitting in any pew
in church, and like having your house in the middle of a road, to take
away the fence which, slight as it may be, is a fortification round your
home. More things than one may come in without being asked. We Americans
had better build more fences than take any away from our lives. There
should be gates for charity to go