Climate than sufferers under his more normal condition might suppose, 

 and I remember a summer it was a good many summers ago 



Gardens wnen f r weeks at a time not a shower fell. The loughs 

 sank low in their beds ; the bogs, seamed with cracks, showed 

 as dry as so many high roads ; the grass turned brown ; the 

 flowers withered ; the mountains the scene was Connemara 

 stood out, with every muscle of their stony anatomy brought 

 into the strongest possible relief; now and then a wind got 

 up, but no rain fell ; every atom of moisture seemed to have 

 vanished out of the atmosphere, and from morning till night the 

 sun shone down with the same broad, unwinking persistency. 

 It was exactly what every one had always been wishing and 

 sighing for, but somehow when it came no one appeared to be 

 particularly gratified, and I recall no very genuine expression 

 of regret when at last one morning we got up to find the 

 sky had lost its brazen look, and that the familiar greys and 

 greyish greens had once more resumed their dominion. 



But it is of gardens, and the effects of climate upon 

 them, that I believe myself at the present moment to be 

 writing! The particular garden which I would ask the 

 reader to imaginatively explore with me lies, not in the pro- 

 fessedly picturesque western half of the county of Galway, 

 but in its much flatter, though hardly less stone-ridden, inland 

 or eastern region. Owing, perhaps, to this superabundance of 

 stones, or more probably to the fact of none of them being 

 very far from the storm-breeding Atlantic, it has come to pass 

 that nearly all the gardens flower ones, be it understood, 

 not merely utilitarian ones in this county of Galway 

 are walled gardens. There may be said, in fact, to be 

 nearly as many walled flower-gardens in it as there are 



4 



