plank sidewalk finished there; after that you took the road or, if you
were so inclined, the river, into which you could throw a stone from
the orchard of the Plummer Place. The house stood roomily and shadily in
ornamental grounds, with a lawn in front of it and a shrubbery at each
side, an orchard behind, and a vegetable garden, the whole intersected
by winding gravel walks, of which Mrs Murchison was wont to say that
a man might do nothing but weed them and have his hands full. In the
middle of the lawn was a fountain, an empty basin with a plaster Triton,
most difficult to keep looking respectable and pathetic in his frayed
air of exile from some garden of Italy sloping to the sea. There was
also a barn with stabling, a loft, and big carriage doors opening on a
lane to the street. The originating Plummer, Mrs Murchison often said,
must have been a person of large ideas, and she hoped he had the money
to live up to them. The Murchisons at one time kept a cow in the barn,
till a succession of "girls" left on account of the milking, and the
lane was useful as an approach to the backyard by the teams that brought
the cordwood in the winter. It was trying enough for a person with
the instinct of order to find herself surrounded by out-of-door
circumstances which she simply could not control but Mrs Murchison often
declared that she could put up with the grounds if it had stopped there.
It did not stop there. Though I was compelled to introduce Mrs Murchison
in the kitchen, she had a drawing-room in which she might have received
the Lieutenant-Governor, with French windows and a cut-glass chandelier,
and a library with an Italian marble mantelpiece. She had an icehouse
and a wine cellar, and a string of bells in the kitchen that connected
with every room in the house; it was a negligible misfortune that not
one of them was in order. She had far too much, as she declared, for
any one pair of hands and a growing family, and if the ceiling was not
dropping in the drawing-room, the cornice was cracked in the library
or the gas was leaking in the dining-room, or the verandah wanted
reflooring if anyone coming to the house was not to put his foot through
it; and as to the barn, if it was dropping to pieces it would just
have to drop. The barn was definitely outside the radius of possible
amelioration--it passed gradually, visibly, into decrepitude, and Mrs
Murchison often wished she could afford to pull it down.

It may be real