Water and Oil

I turned from Nickols' raillery and surveyed the great American garden.
The weeks had flown from May to late July and father's plans were
beginning to be materialized. Where the sunken garden had been filled in
a wide stone well house, the like of which can be found at many of the
farmhouses in the Harpeth Valley, had been built and a chain wheel and
bucket drew up the water from the deep cistern, which was supplied with
underground pipes from the south wing of the Poplars.

"There is no water as soft as open-top cistern water, aerated by a chain
and bucket," father had informed me, and he and Dabney consumed buckets
of it, while Mammy refused anything else for cooking purposes and
insisted on a nightly bath of it for my face. A white clematis in full
bloom clambered over the eaves of the low stone house and a blush rose
nodded at its door, beside which was placed a rough bench made of square
stones and two large slabs, equally moss-covered and worn.

"It is growing to be perfectly wonderful, Nickols," I said, as if I had
seen it for the first time, while my eyes followed the sweep of the
flagstone walk from the well house beneath the old graybeard poplars out
past stretches of velvety lawn, with groups of shrubs and trees casting
deep shadows even to the kitchen garden, whose long rows of vegetables,
bordered with old-fashioned blooming herbs and savories, led the
observer out into the meadows to the Home Farm and beyond to the dim
line of Paradise Ridge. "It is different and distinctive and--and
American," I added.