"Where besides the railroad station?" inquired Helen.
"Can you ask? Think of the Town Hall! There isn't a shrub within a half mile."
"And the steps of the high school," added Ethel Brown. "You go over them every day for ten months, so you're so accustomed to them that you don't see that they're as ugly as ugly. They ought to have bushes planted at each side to bank them from sight."
"I dare say you're right," confessed Helen, while Roger nodded assent and murmured something about Japan ivy.
"Some sort of vine at all the corners would be splendid," insisted Ethel Brown. "Ethel Blue and Dorothy and I planted Virginia Creeper and Japan ivy and clematis wherever we could against the graded school building; didn't we tell you? The principal said we might; he took the responsibility and we provided the plants and did the planting."
"He said he wished we could have some rhododendrons and mountain laurel for the north side of the building, and some evergreen azalea bushes, but he didn't know where we'd get them, because he had asked the committee for them once and they had said that they were spending all their money on the inside of the children's heads and that the outside of the building would have to look after itself."
"That's just the spirit the city fathers have been showing about the park. They've actually got that started, though," said Roger gratefully.
"They're doing hardly any work on it; I went by there yesterday," reported Dorothy. "It's all laid out, and I suppose they've planted grass seed for there are places that look as if they might be lawns in the dim future."
"Too bad they couldn't afford to sod them," remarked James, wisely.
"If they'd set out clumps of shrubs at the corners and perhaps put a carpet of pansies under them it would help," declared Ethel Blue, who had consulted with the Glen Point nurseryman one afternoon when the Club went there to see Margaret and James.