winter, outside the shelter of a greenhouse, may be called a 

 gardener indeed ! 



II. SOME EAST-COAST GARDENS 



But it is time that, in pursuance of the plan of this book, From West 

 we transplant not our plants, but ourselves to another and a to East 

 widely different type of scenery and garden setting. To do so 

 resembles to my mind nothing so much as turning deliberately 

 away from some melancholy and haunting, if barbaric, strain of 

 poetry to a piece of solid and quite uninspired prose. Hitherto, 

 even when not directly alluded to, a pervading sense of the 

 Atlantic has seemed to dominate the situation, and to hover 

 over our page. We may not have been consciously thinking 

 of it, yet its personality has followed and possessed us, as the 

 personality of some invisible potentate might do so long as 

 one remained within his capital. No Gal way hunting pasture, 

 was ever yet so prosaic but that a sudden scream from 

 overhead might unexpectedly, as you crossed it, assail your ear. 

 You look up it is a black-headed gull, equally likely a 

 cormorant. There is, or used to be, an island upon Lough 

 Cutra, well within the hunting district, where a visitor might 

 see, and moreover smell, more cormorants in ten minutes than an 

 average citizen would be likely to have the chance of enjoying 

 in a life-time. An ancient and a powerfully fish-like smell 

 emanated from that island, and anyone who had ever courage 

 to land upon it must have found it to be as extensively decorated 

 with the skeletons of fish, as was the town of Benin with those 

 of men. Mount any little elevation again it does not in the 

 least matter how low and you will surely see, or, if properly 



'3 



