One more acquaintance, whose owners, not content with annexing all that 

 Garden properly belonged to them, have stretched out covetous hands to- 

 wards lawn and kitchen-garden, copse and meadow-land, eager 

 to draw all within the same greedily-gaping horticultural net. 



Yet even as I write one more pen and ink garden, 

 although this time positively the last, leaps irresistibly to the 

 front gate of memory ! Compared with several of those 

 we have been exploring, it is quite a small one, and the strictly 

 horticultural portion of it is again within enclosing walls. 

 At the further end, where two of these walls converge, stands a 

 door, which if you open you will at once find yourself assailed by 

 eager gusts of wind, and by an overwhelming whiff of brini- 

 ness coming from where a small granite pier, with its attendant 

 harbour and boathouses, shows for a moment in the hollow 

 beneath. Large bay-trees, spreading far and wide in the 

 all-but-complete shelter, were in former years the most note- 

 worthy, at all events the largest, of the inmates of that enclosure. 

 These have gradually passed away, but their places have been 

 filled with a succession of all that is best and brightest, 

 passing along the flowery road of bud blossom decay from 

 March to the confines of December. Despite such inevitable 

 changes few gardens have retained their original atmosphere 

 unaltered and untampered with for so long a time as this 

 one, sixty or seventy years at the lowest computation. Out- 

 side of the sheltering walls, but within the same narrowly 

 circumscribed area, other corners of it, too, come back to the 

 memory, with that odd sense of unreality, of vividness, yet 

 cloudiness, which is the note, probably, of all our most far- 

 reaching, and most frequently reiterated impressions. 



Who shall explain why a given effect, dull often to 



24 



