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GATEWAYS OLD AND NEW: SOME EX-
AMPLES OF THE CHARM OF AN INTEREST-
ING ENTRANCE TO A GARDEN
F THE country holds any little part of simple romance
   for you, if you have ever dreamed under green apple
   boughs, if moonlight has ever lured you down shaded
   lanes, through vine-covered gateways to fragrant or-
   chards; then garden gates must forever stir your imagi-
   nation and bring back to you pleasant or sad memories
              oI youhIuI days aind sweeIlears and lug.ilg LuougtLS.
   If you were happily ever a child in country pastures and lanes,
a garden gate is a very lamp to your memory. The first gate
of all that you remember led back from the rough village world with
all its wounds and bruises and complexities to mother s arms; later
this same gateway beckoned you away out to the schoolhouse where
you could get knowledge and feel the stir of that mysterious great
world beyond the hilltops, and still a little later there was a garden
gate which smelled of roses and honeysuckles and opened upon a
summer evening into Paradise. It is the memory 6f this scented gate-
way that makes you sigh when the perfume of June twilight comes
through your windows in countless after years. And last of all, you
remember the garden gate where you took leave of the old home and
made silent promises to the dear mother who had grown to tremble
very easily at the words "Good-bye."
   And so, if your memory is of the kind that hoards incidents of
romance, the garden gate holds for you a sentiment and a poetry that
could never be evoked by the pleasantest fence or the most gracious
summerhouse or the prettiest porch. And to most of us, too, it is
something of a symbol; it leads out to greater spaces or on to more
perfect beauty. It always has for us something of a promise. Thus it
seems very right that a garden gate should hold in itself a special beauty
and allurement; that it should have grace of proportion and charm
of color and fragrance in season and the inviting suggestion of pleas-
ure beyond. It is because to the idealist and naturalist alike that the
garden gate is so much of a symbol that one instinctively demands
that somewhat of mystery should be expressed in them, whether it
is in the trailing flaunting vines or in the dignified strength of line,
beauty of proportion, or in the flowers that blossom about the lath
or beam overhead; so every garden gate should at least pretend to lead
to fairyland. And one should always permit oneself a faint respon-
sive beating of the heart as the gate swings back in pleasant welcome.
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