Miss Goodwin was not there. She had gone for a walk. Disappointed, I went back to my farm, and resolved to clean up the path through the pines, to surprise her. The grove was dripping wet, the brook high, and when I had stacked up the slash from as far as the tamarack swamp, I brought down some old planks from the house and made a walk with them over the wet corner. There was scarcely any slash in the open border of pines along the south wall, so that I had time to smooth with a rake the path on between the vegetables and the hayfield well back toward the house, mow it out with a scythe across the little slope of neglected grass just west of the house, where I was going some day to plant more orchard and place my chicken houses, and finally bring it down sharp through the group of pines by the road just northwest of the woodshed (evidently planted there for a windbreak), ending it up at the driveway which led in to the vegetable garden, around the end of the shed. Then I put up my tools, and walked back proudly around the circle. The path practically encompassed ten acres, so that it made quite a respectable stroll. First, it led west through the small group of pines, then south along the wall by the potato field, where I glimpsed the rows of sprouting plants, and beyond them the lone pine and the acres of Bert's farm and the far hills up the valley. Then it led by the hayfield wall, on the right a tangle of wild roses and other wallside flowers and weeds, on the left the neat rows of my vegetables, with the peas already brushed. At the end of the farm it turned east, between two rows of pine trunks like a natural cloister, and finally entered the tamarack swamp, and then the hush and silence of the pine grove, where the brook ran along in its mossy bed and you might have been miles from any house. It emerged into the maples where Twin Fires was visible, spick and span with new white paint and green shutters, above its orchard. I was very proud of that path, of its length, its charm, its variety, its spontaneous character. It seemed to me then, and it has never ceased to seem, better than any extended acres of formal garden planting, more truly representative of the natural landscape of our country, and so in a truer sense a real garden. There are spots along that brook now where I have sown ferns and wild flowers from the deep woods, brought home, like the trilliums, in a grapevine basket, spots which for sheer exquisiteness of shadowed water and shy bloom and delicate green beat any formal bed you ever dreamed. I have even cleared out three trees to let the morning sun fall on a little pool by the brook, and into that place I have succeeded in transplanting a cardinal flower, which looks at its own reflection in the still water below, across the pool from a blue vervain. Just one cardinal flower--that is all--under a shaft of sunlight in the woods. But it is, I like to think, what Hiroshige would most enjoy.