nd falling
into ruin; the lawn reaching from the front door to the orchard was
spacious, but overgrown with burdocks, nettles and other noxious weeds;
the orchard, which stretched from the lawn to the road on both sides
of the lane, had been allowed to run sadly to wood. At the side of the
house the door-yard was littered with abandoned farm implements, piles
of old fence rails and lumber and other impedimenta, which, though
kindly Nature, abhorring the unsightly rubbish, was doing her utmost to
hide it all beneath a luxuriant growth of docks, milkweed, and nettles,
lent an air of disorder and neglect to the whole surroundings. The
porch, or "stoop," about the summer kitchen was set out with an
assortment of tubs and pails, pots and pans, partially filled with
various evil looking and more evil smelling messes, which afforded an
excellent breeding and feeding place for flies, mosquitoes, and other
unpleasant insects. Adjoining the door yard, and separated from it by a
fence, was the barn yard, a spacious quadrangle flanked on three sides
by barns, stables, and sheds, which were large and finely planned, but
which now shared the general appearance of decrepitude. The fence, which
separated one yard from the other, was broken down, so that the barn
yard dwellers, calves, pigs, and poultry, wandered at will in search of
amusement or fodder to the very door of the kitchen, and so materially
contributed to the general disorder, discomfort, and dirt.

Away from the house, however, where Nature had her own way, the farm
stretched field after field on each side of the snake fenced lane to the
line of woods in the distance, a picture of rich and varied beauty. From
the rising ground on which the house was situated a lovely vista swept
right from the kitchen door away to the remnant of the forest primeval
at the horizon. On every field the signs of coming harvest were
luxuriantly visible, the hay fields, grey-green with blooming "Timothy"
and purple with the deep nestling clover, the fall wheat green and
yellowing into gold, the spring wheat a lighter green and bursting into
head, the oats with their graceful tasselated stalks, the turnip field
ribboned with its lines of delicate green on the dark soil drills, back
of all, the "slashing" where stumps, blackened with fire, and trunks
of trees piled here and there in confusion, all overgrown with weeds,
represented the transition stage between forest and harvest field, and
beyond t