Memoirs of an editor : fifty years of American journalism / Edward P. Mitchell.

86

MEMIOIRS OF AN EDITOR

certain country place at Wellesley, adorned by the whimsical imagination of a sewing-machine magnate and millionaire. The big cattle-barn was decorated on its exterior
with huge frescoes representing the ride of the Valkyrie.
There was an artificial grotto with glittering stalactites
and stalagmites of crystal. You wandered into the ramble and stepped on a trick bridge which suddenly descended with you almost into the water. Then you came
to a large cactus in a wayside pot, labelled "American
Aloe-About to Bloom!" Across the pathway was a
convenient stool, on which you seated yourself to await
the blooming; but the seat let you down to the ground level
while there popped up out of the agave a red devil,
grinning maliciously at your discomfiture. A little farther
on was a monumental champagne-bottle, thirty feet high,
composed of innumerable empty champagne-bottles stuck
on prongs of the iron framework. Still farther, a freak
pyramid, built wholly of discarded and rusty locomotivestacks, of the flaring pattern of the wood-burning engines.
What originality of conception; what 'industry of execution! Was there ever in any of the six continents aught
in the way of landscape-gardening comparable to the
Baker estate at Wellesley?
The Boston stage in the early Seventies: Charles
Mathews at the Globe as Mr. Puff in "The Critic," coming down to the footlights to shake hands with the orchestra leader and affably inquiring after Mr. Koppitz
and the little Koppitzes; Fechter and Carlotta Le Clerc
at the same lamented establishment; William Warren
with Annie Clarke and that wonderful stock company at
the Boston Museum rendering old English comedies remoter than Sheridan and now so seldom seen —Congreve,

perhaps, or Farquhar, or even Vanbrugh, the architectplaywright for whom his enemy wrote the epitaph:
Lie heavy on him, earth, for he
Laid many a heavy load on thee '