264 ALPINES AND BOG-PLANTS 
nourish goldfish in your pools, see to it that the water 
be deep enough to guarantee them from the heron’s 
marauding bill. Indeed, the too common fault in pond- 
building is shallowness, which fosters slime and water- 
weed to an intolerable extent, and makes more disastrous 
the silting up of dead leaves in autumn and winter. A 
shallow pond must needs be exhaustively cleaned out 
each season, and even so the job will never be satisfactory 
for more than a month. Intolerable sight, a shallow 
little basin all a muck of weeds and autumn wreckage ; 
not to mention that water-weed clogs and ultimately 
conquers even the most stalwart Nymphaeas. ‘lherefore I 
would prescribe no less a depth than four feet for the 
pond, and will now begin at last to prescribe for those 
who refuse to be daunted by my jeremiads, and insist on 
having a water-garden. And, first of all, let me say that 
if the water-garden be hard to keep in order, yet, if kept 
in order, dainty and clean, it is the very jewel and eye 
and omphalos of the rock-garden, doubling its own 
beauty by the neighbourhood of grey stone, and doubling 
the beauty of the stone by its own limpid light. Pray, 
then, and make offering to the high gods that you may 
have running water in abundance at your disposal. So you 
shall have a little mountain stream to bubble and splash 
through the rock-garden, trickling dispersedly down over 
the shoulder of the Alpine bog, and so to leap like Niagara 
into a bright sparkling little lake below. 
In planning your lake, be very careful of its curves. 
Map and scheme with the utmost deliberation. Unfor- 
tunately, this is not a question for general law-giving, 
as the lie of each piece of ground must determine the 
proper shape of any piece of water. But a misplaced 
bay or promontory will be as fatal to the harmony of 
your design as a duly, tactfully placed one will be satis- 
fying and completing. Therefore go at the shaping of 
