Polly has planted the lawn with a lot of shade trees and shrubs, and has added some clumps of fruit trees.  Few trees have been planted near the house; the four fine oaks, from which we take our name, stand without rivals and give ample shade.  The great black oak near the east end of the porch is a tower of strength and beauty, which is “seen and known of all men,” while the three white oaks farther to the west form a clump which casts a grateful shade when the sun begins to decline.  The seven acres of forest to the east is left severely alone, save where the carriage drive winds through it, and Polly watches so closely that the foot of the Philistine rarely crushes her wild flowers.  Its sacredness recalls the schoolgirl’s definition of a virgin forest:  “One in which the hand of man has never dared to put his foot into it.”  Polly wanders in this grove for hours; but then she knows where and how things grow, and her footsteps are followed by flowers.  If by chance she brushes one down, it rises at once, shakes off the dust, and says, “I ought to have known better than to wander so far from home.”

She keeps a wise eye on the vegetable garden, too, and has stores of knowledge as to seed-time and harvest and the correct succession of garden crops.  She and Johnson planned a greenhouse, which Nelson built, for flowers and green stuff through the winter, she said; but I think it is chiefly a place where she can play in the dirt when the weather is bad.  Anyhow, that glass house cost the farm $442, and the interest and taxes are going on yet.  I as well as Polly had to do some building that autumn.  Three more chicken-houses were built, making five in all.  Each consists in ten compartments twenty feet wide, of which each is intended to house forty hens.  When these houses were completed, I had room for forty pens of forty each, which was my limit for laying hens.  In addition was one house of ten pens for half-grown chickens and fattening fowls.  It would take the hatch of another year to fill my pens, but one must provide for the future.  These three houses cost, in round numbers, $2100,—­five times as much as Polly’s glass house,—­but I was not going to play in them.

I also built a cow-house on the same plan as the first one, but about half the size.  This was for the dry cows and the heifers.  It cost $2230, and gave me stable room enough for the waiting stock, so that I could count on forty milch cows all the time, when my herd was once balanced.  Forty cows giving milk, six hundred swine of all ages, putting on fat or doing whatever other duty came to hand, fifteen or sixteen hundred hens laying eggs when not otherwise engaged, three thousand apple trees striving with all their might to get large enough to bear fruit,—­these made up my ideal of a factory farm; and it looked as if one year more would see it complete.