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VILLAGE SKETCHES I 

 No. VII. 



Whitsun-Eve. 



THE pride of ray heart and the delight of ray eyes is my garden. Our 

 house, which is in dimensions very much like a bird-cage, and might, with 

 almost equal convenience, be laid on a shelf, or hung up in a tree, would 

 be utterly unbearable in warm weather, were it not that we have a retreat 

 out of doors, and a very pleasant retreat it is. To make my readers 

 fully comprehend it, I must describe our whole territories. 



Fancy a small plot of ground, with a pretty low irregular cottage at one 

 end ; a large granary, divided from the dwelling by a little court running 

 along one side ; and a long thatched shed open towards the garden, and 

 supported by wooden pillars on the other. The bottom is bounded, half 

 by an old wall, and half by an old paling, over which we see a pretty 

 distance of woody hills. The house, granary, wall, and paling, are covered 

 with vines, cherry-trees, roses, honey-suckles, and jessamines, with great 

 clusters of tall hollyhocks running up between them; a large elder over- 

 hanging the little gate, and a magnificent bay tree, such a tree as shall 

 scarcely be matched in these parts, breaking with its beautiful conical 

 form the horizontal lines of the buildings. This is my garden ; and the 

 long pillared shed, the sort of rustic arcade which runs along one side, 

 parted from the flower-beds by a row of rich geraniums, is our out-of-door 

 drawing-room. 



I know nothing so pleasant as to sit there on a summer afternoon, with 

 the western sun flickering through the great elder tree, and lighting up our 

 gay parterres, where flowers and flowering shrubs are set as thick as grass 

 in a field, a wilderness of blossom, interwoven, intertwined, wreathy, gar- 

 landy, profuse beyond all profusion, where we may guess that there is 

 such a thing as mould, but never see it. I know nothing so pleasant as 

 to sit in the shade of that dark bower, with the eye resting on that bright 

 piece of colour, lighted so gloriously by the evening sun, now catching a 

 glimpse of the little birds as they fly rapidly in and out of their nests for 

 there are always two or three birds' nests in the thick tapestry of cherry- 

 trees, honey-suckles, and China roses, which cover our walls now tracing 

 the gay gambols of the common butterflies as they sport around the dah- 

 lia's ; now watching that rarer moth, which the country people, fertile in 

 pretty names, call the bee-bird ;* that bird-like insect, which flutters in 

 the hottest days over the sweetest flowers, inserting its long proboscis into 

 the small tube of the jessamine, and hovering over the scarlet blossoms of 

 the geranium, whose bright colour seems reflected on its own feathery 

 breast ; that insect which seems so thoroughly a creature of the air, never 

 at rest; always, even when feeding, self- poised, and self-supported, and 

 whose wings in their ceaseless motion, have a sound so deep, so full, so 

 lulling, so musical. Nothing so pleasant as to sit amid that mixture of the 

 flower and the leaf, watching the bee-bird ! Nothing so pretty to look at 

 as my garden ! It is quite a picture ; only unluckily it resembles a picture 

 in more qualities than one, it is fit for nothing but to look at. One might 

 as well think of walking in a bit of framed canvass. There are walks to 

 be sure tiny paths of smooth gravel, by courtesy called such but they 



* Sphinx ligustri, privet hawk-moth. 



