Page:A Colonial Wooing.djvu/46

 and from the two larger windows of the roomy kitchen, had several pleasing features, and these she succeeded in preserving, when the suggestion was made to clear the intervening ground of its scattered trees and cut a straight and level road to the creek's bank. A stately tulip-tree, a branching elm, and half a dozen sturdy scarlet-oaks crowned a bit of slightly rising ground, and between them she had the road to wind, and even prevailed on her husband to plant other trees and a short hedge of rhododendron, that the whole way might in time become a most pleasant place. She would indeed have gone even further in this matter of landscape gardening, but Matthew's patience was exhausted, and some one had made the unfortunate remark that his wife seemed to be reproducing some of the features of her old home. Then Matthew became obstinate beyond cure, for it had ever been a sore trial that his wife could not see the world about them with his eyes. Were they not abundantly prosperous, and was not this all-sufficient, and an evidence, too, that heaven was smiling upon them?