from green to scarlet, from grey to mauve. In the other bed, orange and vermilion cannas, castor-oil beans, and elephant ears, a precisely named vegetation, flourished. A circular spray, attached to a long hose, which crawled from a hydrant near the front porch, played somewhere on this lawn nearly all day, and one day a week, Mr. Arlington, an aged Negro, worked lazily with lawn-mower and sickle, cutting the grass. Robins, blue-birds, and yellow warblers hopped about on the turf, or settled in the trees and bushes, chirping cheerfully, and, in their passage from branch to grass, flashing their vivid plumage in the sunlight. Occasionally a hummingbird darted into the cup of a canna, while the trunk of a dead tree, shorn of its branches, was surmounted by a miniature house which furnished a dwelling-place for a family of wrens.
At the rear of the house, approached by a gravel driveway, stood a large, wooden barn, which at present had fallen into disuse, at least insofar as regarded the purpose of its construction. After a runaway, in which to be sure, no one had been hurt, Gareth's father determined to have nothing more to do with horses. He had, accordingly, sold the mare and discharged the hired-man, and now the barn was employed as a receptacle for tool-chests, boxes of discarded household goods, unstable furniture, carious mattresses, rakes, hoes, ice-cream freezers, and other articles which, when no longer of utility, are always given or thrown away in the city where
