the narrow territory of twenty yards not occupied by the family mansion. Three orange-trees shed their fruit in autumn, their shade always. Under a corpulent peach-tree was a little pool of water for the solace of three or four geese, which multiplying, gave their contribution to the complicated and limited system of revenue, upon which reposed the existence of the family; and as all these means were insufficient, there was a garden of esculents of the size of a scapulary, surrounded by a paling, to shelter it from the voracity of the goslings, and which produced such vegetables as enter into South American cookery, the whole sparkling and illuminated by groups of common flowers, a mulberry-colored rose-bush, and various other flowering shrubs. This was a sample of the exquisite economy of land in a Spanish colonial family, and also of the inexhaustible productions which the country people of Europe know how to extract from it. The manure of the fowls and the horse which my father rode, passed daily into use, to give new vigor to that little spot of land which never wearied of yielding its varied and luxuriant growths, and when I wished to suggest to my mother some views of rural economy culled from books, I was deservedly treated as a pedant in the presence of that science of culture, which was the favorite pleasure and occupation of her long life. Now, at seventy-six years of age, if she escapes us from within our dwelling, she is sure to be found propping up some drooping plants, responding to our objections with the violence of feeling that possesses her on seeing them so maltreated.
"Yet in that Noah's ark there was some little corner where were steeped and prepared the colors with which she dyed her webs, and a vat of bran, from whence issued every week a fair proportion of exquisitely white starch. In prosperous times was added to these the manufacture of
