"Come along, Pearl," said she, drawing her away, "Come and look
into this fair garden. It may be we shall see flowers there;
more beautiful ones than we find in the woods."
Pearl accordingly ran to the bow-window, at the further end of
the hall, and looked along the vista of a garden walk, carpeted
with closely-shaven grass, and bordered with some rude and
immature attempt at shrubbery. But the proprietor appeared
already to have relinquished as hopeless, the effort to
perpetuate on this side of the Atlantic, in a hard soil, and
amid the close struggle for subsistence, the native English
taste for ornamental gardening. Cabbages grew in plain sight;
and a pumpkin-vine, rooted at some distance, had run across the
intervening space, and deposited one of its gigantic products
directly beneath the hall window, as if to warn the Governor
that this great lump of vegetable gold was as rich an ornament
as New England earth would offer him. There were a few
rose-bushes, however, and a number of apple-trees, probably the
descendants of those planted by the Reverend Mr. Blackstone, the
first settler of the peninsula; that half mythological personage
who rides through our early annals, seated on the back of a
bull.
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