me of them had
flower-gardens that appeared princelier pleasaunces to my boy than he
has ever seen since in Europe or America. Very likely they were not so
vast or so splendid as they looked to him then; but one of them at least
had beds of tulips and nasturtiums, and borders of flags and pinks, with
clumps of tiger-lilies and hollyhocks; and in the grassy yard beside it
there were high bushes full of snow-balls, and rose-trees with
moss-roses on them. In this superb domain there were two summer-houses
and a shed where bee-hives stood; at the end of the garden was a
bath-house, and you could have a shower-bath, if you were of a mind
to bring the water for it from the pump in the barn-yard. But this was
all on a scale of unequalled magnificence; and most of the houses, which
were mostly of wood, just had a good big yard with plum-trees and
cherry-trees in it; and a vegetable garden at one side that the boy
hated to weed. My boy's grandfather had a large and beautiful garden,
with long arbors of grapes in it, that the old gentleman trimmed and
cared for himself. They were delicious grapes; and there were black
currants, which the grandfather liked, because he had liked them when he
was a boy himself in the old country, but which no Boy's Town boy could
have been induced to take as a gracious gift. Another boy had a father
that had a green-house; he was a boy that would let you pull pie-plant
in the garden, and would bring out sugar to let you eat it with in the
green-house. His cleverness was rewarded when his father was elected
governor of the state; and what made it so splendid was that his father
was a Whig.

Every house, whether it had a flower-garden or not, had a woodshed,
which was the place where a boy mostly received his friends, and made
his kites and wagons, and laid his plots and plans for all the failures
of his life. The other boys waited in the woodshed when he went in to
ask his mother whether he might do this or that, or go somewhere. A boy
always wanted to have a stove in the woodshed and fit it up for himself,
but his mother would not let him, because he would have been certain to
set the house on fire.

Each fellow knew the inside of his own house tolerably well, but seldom
the inside of another fellow's house, and he knew the back-yard better
than the front-yard. If he entered the house of a friend at all, it was
to wait for him by the kitchen-door, or to get up to the garret with him
by the kitchen