Above all, we had the perpetual incentive of gardening to keep our eyes toward the future. A true garden, like a life well lived, is forever becoming, forever in process, forever leading on toward new goals. Life, indeed, goes hand in hand with your garden, and never a fair thought but you write it in flowers, never a beautiful picture but you paint it if you can, and with the striving learn patience, and with the half accomplishment, the "divine unrest." Horas Non Numero Nisi Serenas reads the ancient motto on our dial plate, and as I look back on the years of Twin Fires' genesis, or forward into the future, the hours that are not sunny are indeed not marked for me. I am writing now at a table beneath the pergola. The floor is of brick, laid (somewhat irregularly) by Stella and me, for we still are poor, as the Eckstroms would reckon poverty, and none of what Mrs. Deland has called "the grim inhibitions of wealth" prevents us from doing whatever we can with our own hands, and finding therein a double satisfaction. Over my head rustle the thick vines--a wistaria among them, which may or may not survive another winter. It is June again. The ghost of Rome in roses is marching across the lawn beyond the white sundial, and there are arches in perspective now beneath the level superstructure. The little brick bird bath is covered with ivy, and last year's self-sown double Emperor Williams are already blue about it. The lawn is a thick, rich green. To the west the grape arbour rises above a white bench of real marble, and I can see dappled shadows beneath the whitish young leaves. I know that around the pool stately Japanese iris are budding now, great clumps of them revelling in the moisture they so dearly love, soon to break into blooms as large as plates, and beyond them is a little lawn, with the bench our own hands made against a clump of cedars, and on each side a small statue of marble on a slender chestnut pedestal, carved and painted to balance the bench. I know also that a path now wanders up the brook almost to the road, amid the wild tangle, and ends suddenly in the most unexpected nook beneath a willow tree, where irises fringe a second tiny pool. I know that the path still wanders the other way into the pines--pines larger now and more murmurous of the sea--past beds of ferns and a lone cardinal flower that will bloom in a shaft of sunlight. Somewhere down that path my wife is wandering, and she is not alone. A little form (at least she says it has form!) sleeps beside her, while she sits, perhaps, with a book or more likely with sewing in her busy fingers, or more likely still with hands that stray toward the sleeping child and ears that listen to the sea-shell murmur of the pines whispering secrets of the future. Is he to be a Napoleon or a Pasteur? No less a genius, surely, the prophetic pines whisper to the listening mother! My own pen halts in its progress and the ink dries on the point.