rim of the fountain
basin a tiny brown-green lizard lay motionless, sunning itself. Through
the shrubbery a cardinal darted like a crimson shuttle, to rock
impudently from a fleering limb, and here and there on the bluish-ivory
sky, motionless as a pasted wafer, hung a hawk; from time to time one of
these wavered and slanted swiftly down, to climb once more in a huge
spiral to its high tower of sky.

Perhaps it wondered, as its telescopic eye looked down. That had been
its choicest covert, that disheveled tangle where the birds held
perpetual carnival, the weasel lurked in the underbrush and the rabbit
lined his windfall. Now the wildness was gone. The lines of the formal
garden lay again ordered and fair. The box-rows had been thinned of
their too-aged shrubs and filled in anew. The wilderness garden to-be
was still a stretch of raked and level soil, but all across this slender
green spears were thrusting up--the promise of buds and blooms. A
pergola, glistening white, now upheld the runaway vines, making a
sickle-like path from the upper terrace to the lake. In the barn loft
the pigeons still quarrelled over their new cotes of fresh pine, and
under a clump of locust trees at a little distance from the house, a
half-dozen dolls' cabins on stilts stood waiting the honey-storage of
the black and gold bees.

There were new denizens, also. These had arrived in a dozen zinc tanks
and willow hampers, to the amaze of a sleepy express clerk at the
railroad station: two swans now sailed majestically over the lily-pads
of the lake, along its gravel rim a pair of bronze-colored ducks waddled
and preened, and its placid surface rippled and broke to the sluggish
backs of goldfish and the flirting fins of red Japanese carp. Hens and
guinea-fowl strutted and ran in a wire wattle behind the kitchen, and on
the wall, now straightened and repaired, a splendid peacock spread his
barbaric plumage of spangled purple and screeched exultingly to his
sober-hued mate.

The house itself wore another air. Its look of unkemptness had largely
vanished. The comb of the roof had been straightened and the warped
shutters repaired. The boards of the porch flooring had been relaid.
Moss and green lichen had been scoured from the bases of the great
weather-beaten pillars. These, however, bore no garish coat of new
paint. The soft gray tone of age remained, but the bleakness and
forlornness were gone; there was about all now a warmth and genial
bear