OUR SENTIMENTAL GARDEN 



could draw it, he knew it for a purely fantastic nightmare / 



knew that no such tall and steep wave as he beheld in his 



sleep could exist in nature, A few years agowe were 



at Brighton, I remember he brought up to me from the 



hotel room an illustrated paper, and, laying it on the table 



before me, said : " Look there is my dream ! " 



I looked. It was an illustration that held the whole page. 



I saw a huge wall of water, rising sheer black, with a 



toppling crest of white an awful, threatening vision ! I 



read underneath : " Photograph of the recent tidal wave in 



Japan/' 



Who can explain the mystery ? He had had that dream 



first as a baby boy in Paris, some forty-five years before. 



No such sight, no such picture had ever come across his 



waking consciousness. 



A tidal wave in Japan ... so far has my discursive mind 



led me from garden ghosts ! 



We know a haunted garden belonging to an old Manor 

 House in Dorsetshire which was our abode one summer, 

 five or six years ago. The house had once been Catherine 

 Parr's. It was full of ghosts too, but I am none too sure 

 that they were mellow sixteenth-century spectres/ rather 

 I believe were they the objectionable offspring of a table- 

 rapping spiritualistic owner. 



The garden ghost was, to our thinking, neither Tudor nor 

 modern, but that of a sad little eighteenth-century nun. 

 For, passing through many hands, the place had for a time 

 been a convent. A gentle community, turned out by the 

 French Revolution, had been offered a refuge in this far 

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