II 

 A BEAUTIFUL GARDEN 



The Walled I OPENED the gate and went in. The garden was like no other 

 Garden garden of my knowledge, it seemed to surpass, in its wonderful 

 indefinableness, other gardens of pleasure that I knew. It was 

 well kept ; in perfect order. Few and far between were its 

 wandering weeds ; and yet it was a wilderness. The season of 

 the year was mid- July, the hour, seven A.M. : the space of 

 ground, an oblong square enwalled. Four gates and one, gave 

 entrance to it. The gates were all of wrought iron, of English 

 make, and old. The walls red brick coloured with the greys 

 and golds of age, crested with Wall-flowers, seed-laden, and with 

 light waving grasses and all kinds of bird-sown vegetation. 



The fifth gate, small and narrow and most delicately 

 wrought, is Empire Gate ; so named, for like the links of our 

 Great Empire, it is " strong as steel yet light as gossamer ! " 



Not here I entered, but by the tall eastern gate that opens 

 upon lawns and dark Yew hedges and " herbaceous borders " 

 at this season filled with Delphinium rising above pink clusters 

 of Polyantha Rose, in rich abundance. One tires of all the 

 garden-talk of " herbaceous borders." Some are too apt to talk 

 for ever of herbaceous this and that. To a young lady visiting 

 my garden and rejoicing in recent possession of one of her own, 

 and voluble of garden terms, I once cried in despair " I don't 

 know what herbaceous is ! " Her instant reply, " Oh, it means 

 come up again." Perhaps the definition is as good as many a 

 more studied one. 



The morning sun shone through and through each crimson 



62 



