On the other side we decided to eliminate all flower beds in the open, merely planting iris and forget-me-not on the rim of the pool. We would clear out a wide semicircle of lawn, with the bench at the centre of the circumference, and plant our remaining flowers against the shrubbery on the sides, which was chiefly the wild red osier dogwood (_cornus stolonifera_). I got a brush scythe, a hatchet, a spade, a grub hoe, and a rake, and we went to work. Work is certainly the word. It was not difficult to clear the brush and the tall, rank weeds and grasses away from our semicircle, which was hardly more than thirty feet in diameter, but to spade up the black soil thereafter, to eliminate the long, tenacious roots of the witch grass and the weeds, to clear out the stubborn stumps of innumerable little trees and wild shrubs which had overrun the place, to spread evenly the big pile of soil we had excavated from the pool, to reduce it all to a clean, level condition for sowing grass, was more than I had bargained for. Stella gave up helping, for it was beyond her strength; but I kept on, through the long, hot July afternoons, and at last had it ready. The time of year was anything but propitious for sowing grass seed, but we planted it, none the less, trusting that in such a low, moist spot it might make a catch. Then we turned to the bench. "Gracious, you have to be everything to be a gardener, don't you?" Stella laughed, as we tried to draw a sketch first, which should satisfy us. "The bench ought to balance the old Governor Winthrop highboy top of the front door. But I'm sure I don't know how we're going to make it." "Patience," said I, turning the leaves of a catalogue of expensive marble garden furniture. "Just a simple design of the classic period will do. Colonial furniture was based on the Greek orders." We found at last the picture of a marble bench which could be duplicated in general outline with wooden planking, so I telephoned to the lumber dealer in the next town for two twenty-four-inch wide chestnut planks, and was fairly staggered by the bill when it came. It appears that a twenty-four-inch wide plank nowadays has to come from North Carolina, or some other distant point, and is rarer than charity, at least that is what they told me. "I think it would be cheaper in marble," said Stella. "And it looks to me as if you could make the bench out of one plank." "We want another bench on the sundial lawn," said I, wisely. "You do _now_," said she. "But if I hadn't got two planks," said I, "and had spoiled the first one, then we'd have had to wait two or three days again." "Oh, that was the reason!" she smiled.