tend all of them, large and small alike, to fall within a more or Dublin Bay 



less well-marked category. If no turbulent and sombre Atlantic 



is at hand to lend them dignity, there are at least the never- 



failingly attractive vicissitudes of the tides to give width and 



variety to the backgrounds. Sauntering beside their flower 



borders your eye instinctively travels onward, and gets caught 



and momentarily entangled amid an intricacy of sandbars and 



salt-water lakes, marbled with sun and passing clouds, or rests 



upon brown fishing-sails or some far-off trail of smoke, details 



which are never for ten consecutive minutes quite the same. 



Again, peering over any of their frontiers, you will almost to a 



certainty perceive, beyond the nearest embankment of Fuchsia, 



Tamarisk, and so on, a crowd of small waves in the act of either 



rushing eagerly forward to bombard it, or else of retreating to 



lose themselves amid long yellow ridges and shining expanses 



of sand, where, growing disheartened, they by and by melt away 



and perish. Details such as these, if only as a variation of the too 



familiar meadowy and hedgerow backgrounds, seem to bring a 



new flavour into gardening. The horticulturist may be very 



likely is entirely absorbed in some intricate plan of colour 



combination, or the yet deeper mysteries of propagation, yet all 



the while some little corner of his brain will have escaped from 



these labours, and will be occupying itself with who shall say 



what sea-going excursions, what, to himself unknown, voyages 



and divagations. 



In the case of one large and often-described garden lying 

 to the north of Dublin l this sense of the neighbourhood of a 

 restless element takes on a larger and more stately aspect. Here, 

 through gaps in a line of Beech trees, not alone the nearer and 



1 St Ann's. 



15 



