XXX 



ONE of the advantages of being " little people in a little 

 place " is the pleasure small things can give one. The 

 Duke of Devonshire has seventy men in his garden. Is it 

 possible to imagine taking an interest in anything conducted 

 on so enormous a scale ? It is not gardening, it is horti- 

 cultural government ! There can be no individual know- 

 ledge of any " beloved flower/' as our Dutch friend has it. 

 Outside a millionaire's greenhouse we once beheld regiment 

 after regiment of Begonia pots. It made one's brain reel. 

 How insupportable anything so repeated would become ! 

 Even in small gardens there is too much of a tendency 

 nowadays to overdo garden effects. The flagged-path 

 effect can certainly be overdone. We were tempted to 

 visit a farmhouse the other day, adorably placed on a high 

 Sussex down just; where a stretch of table-land dominates 

 an immense panorama of undulating country, and a vast 

 half-circle of horizon. With a few more trees no situation 

 could have been more beautiful. 



" It was a party of the name of Mosensohn " who had 

 taken the old farmhouse, we are told, and they were trans- 

 mogrifying it according to the most modern principles of 

 how the plutocrat's farmhouse should look. 

 In some ways it was very well done. The fine old lines 

 of wall and roof were carefully preserved / the high brick 

 wall with its arched doorway and door with the grille in 

 it, were quite in keeping, and gave one a sense of com- 

 fortable seclusion as one stepped in off the high road. 

 But the square court, once the farmyard, divided by two 

 different levels, was completely flagged. Only a few beds 



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