APPLE-TREE AND BENCH.

Exeter Place--The Country--Friendship--Pleasant Traits--Some Letters.

EXETER Place, into which the family moved, is terminated by a
huge trellis, substantially built against the end wall of a house.
This is covered by creeping plants, which take their rise in a
diminutive railed space in the shape of a triangle, with a water-
less fountain like an epergne in the centre. The end of the lane
looks like a theatre-flat which has performed the garden-scene
during several highly melodramatic seasons. A Flora stands
there, as if for a label, to prevent misconception in the civic
mind and to enforce rurality, which she does in melancholy
fashion. It was a poor substitute for the woods and fields of
West Roxbury. Mr. Parker languished for the natural scenes
to which he had been from birth accustomed: next to books,
they were essential to his comfort and happiness. He used to
anticipate his summer vacations, when for several years the
family would return to the house at Spring Street, with childlike
delight; every spring he began to time the blossoming of the
shrubs and trees, and to tell over what he should be too late for
and what he should find. It was a sore disappointment if he
did not get out of town in season for the apple-blossoms, but his

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