If you went on beyond the barn you came to a clump of currant and gooseberry bushes which ran out in a thin line to the fence, which by this time had lost its rose-bushes and become a prickly tangle of blackberries. Enclosed by the blackberries and the currants was the broad expanse of the vegetable garden, with corn in summer that Gilbert could get quite lost in, and an amazing variety of good vegetables to eat. The vegetable garden ran up to Uncle Marcus’s barn and his garden. Straight down back of Garna’s house, through the middle of the yard, ran a path, part way through a grape-arbor of its own, and then past the currant bushes. At the end of the garden it joined a path in Uncle Marcus’s yard. Along the foot of the path, where it passed the garden, was a row of rhubarb, and on the other side Aunt Nan’s sweet-peas, which she planted every spring. On the other side of the path was an open meadow where the grass was not cut, and where Gilbert sometimes lay on cool summer days and looked up at great white clouds floating past in the blue sky. Nearer the house you came to a wilderness of fruit-trees, pears of all kinds and apples, and as you approached the street the yard broke into flower-beds and shrubs and bushes. Close to the house grew lilies-of-the-valley, and a curious ribbon-grass which Aunt Nan could take between her fingers and blow shrill whistles on. Along the path which went past the dining-room window were beds of pink and white peonies and tall white lilies which had a smell so sweet that Gilbert felt almost faint when he touched them. And along the whole side of the yard was a beautiful japonica hedge, with its white and red flowers in the spring, which turned into sweetly smelling green balls in the summer. There were great maples interspersed in the hedge that threw down their keys in the spring. And all along the front of the yard, close to the house, ran a white wooden fence just within which was a line of graceful black-walnut trees, with their thin green clustered leaves and the green nuts which fell in heaps on the ground. Aunt Nan and Gilbert would collect them in sacks and put them in the barn. There they would grow all black, so that you could strip off the covering and find the crinkled nutshell within. Then you cracked them on a stone.