A Risky Investigation - How Sowing " Lawn " Grass Don't Make Lawns - How Parson Camperdown's Lawn Was Reformed - Lady Schnipticket's Opinions - The Punishment Of M. Tavish.

THOUGH she is apt to be right all the while, Mrs. Tarryer's persistent spirit of investigation sometimes carries her into positions that make me feel rather nervous. The matter of Parson Camperdown's grass, in the heat of it, while it was the talk of the whole country-side, and was expected, by outsiders to produce permanent breaches between several excellent families, caused even Mrs. Tarryer to lose some sleep. It is all right now, and we wonder at the uproar and hard feelings that are past. These are worth recording as a warning and a comfort for urgent experiments and those who lead their friends into speculations which seem risky for a while, though they turn out ever so well in the end.

The Camperdown lawn was a large, pleasant door-yard, with a beautiful sward, depastured by favorite horses just out of harness, in the time of Mrs. Camperdown's father. She don't think it improved much since the greater part of it was used as a paddock for ripe lambs and wethers, and guests could tell by counting the flock from their bed-room windows, just how many head it took to supply Farmer Sothern's hospitable table.

The Parson had the ground trenched and the tile-drained soon after the old farmer died, making the grade more nicely rotund, but so stirring up the deep gravel - Mrs. Tarryer declares - that in places it has never stuck together enough since to afford capillary moisture during periods of drought. Many a load of loam and weed-seed compost has the Parson applied to that lawn, and by so doing even Mrs. Camperdown admits to her intimate friends that the Rev'd Dionysius has raised the land around the buildings and secured a moist cellar after every washing rain. Men are mistaken who think their wives do not understand their engineering feats !

Right in front of the house and just across the carriage-road is an open, sunny space where the grass has been nine-tenths Panicum sanguinale for years, in spite of this or that "lawn-mixture," raked in every spring.

"It is strange our grass should winter-kill where the drainage is so thorough," said Parson Camperdown, one sunny morning in March, regarding the great brown patches in front of his door, as we were ending a neighborly call.

"That grass was killed, dead as a door-nail, Mr. Camperdown, by the first hard frosts last fall. That is nothing but finger grass you are raising there, sir. It is strictly annual in Tarrytown".

This dead sod of panicum the Parson stoutly denied - claiming his "last mixture was largely of Cynosurus cristatus,"

"Oh, that cristatus is one of the things which never come up to spoil its market!" says Mrs. Tarryer, and then she triumphantly showed the Parson a handful of the old "fingers" full of seed, recumbent in the dead sod as rolled down by the lawn-mowing of the previous season. He had to give in.

It was about that time, no doubt, that Mrs. Tarryer really began scheming to make Mr. Camperdown work out his own salvation from that pestiferous weed. She told me on the way home that he might reseed till doomsday as he was going on, without ever getting rid of it. Or, being a woman of great forecast, she may have been educating him unconsciously for a public example all these recent years. At any rate, early in April a broad patch of the Parson's door-yard was planted in "dotted lawn," as figured in my July letter, and the Parson's Scotch-Irishman, Dingball, with one of Mrs. Tarryer's thrust-hoes, was to hoe and cross-hoe it, three times a week if necessary, to keep the weeds down.

There are a number of grasses under strict government in our garden which Mrs. Tarryer knows all about, but it appears that she had given the Parson a new pet of hers - a chance seedling in a poor, dry spot, where some seedsman's fancy packets had been sown. It had distinguished itself within two or three years by making a circlet of close turf about as big as a card-table, and as fine as moss. Dingball cut that moss turf in tiny bits of half an inch or more square, under Mrs. Tarryer's directions, and set it in straight rows each way, about fourteen inches apart.

What Dingball said, and what the frequent visitors and strangers,who often drove past the Parson's door to see what was going on in his preserves, said, would make a funny book and a valuable history of our graministic progress, but we must cut the most of that here.

Parson Camperdown entered into the scheme, at first, with a great deal of enthusiasm. You would have thought it was his own plan, to hear him talk about it. Mrs. Tarryer took him very cleverly on his antiquarian side. It is whispered that he has the fullest and most curious collection of chamber ceramics in the world, and that the very vessel with which the mother* of Marcus Aurelius despised the Roman sewers by emptying her slops on the grass of the campus, is one of the illustrious varities of his collection. The Parson also has on his bookshelves all the ancient and modern agricultural worthies, from Hesiod and Homer to Tusser, Jethro Tull, Maxwell, Stillingfleet, Laurence, and White of Selbourne, who called himself an "out-of-door naturalist." With these authors, Mrs. Tarryer is a great deal more familiar than Parson Camper-down is, but she showed him how the planting of sod, cut small, is an ancient and time-honored practice, and he caught on to that idea at once.

"Seeds vary," he said, "but a select sod has a long pedigree. If I ever bought good sward seed I never knew it at the time, and when I thought I had, afterward, and tried to get more of the same, our traders don't know where their seeds come from well enough to duplicate an order. But sod carries its life-history in its face".

Parson Camperdown imagined he got these views by reading, but Mrs. Camperdown knew where they came from.