26 . A BOOK ABOUT THE GARDEN. 



display was gayest and brightest we discovered that 

 we were quickly satisfied by brief and infrequent 

 surveys. And then, on the eve of our garden part}', 

 to which we had invited the elite of the county, 

 joyfully hoping to plunge most of them into the 

 depths of an envious despair, that storm ! early in 

 July, a thunderstorm, a hailstorm, and lo ! my grand 

 picture looked more like a palette ; the brightness 

 and the colour and the form were gone from the 

 drenched and drooping flowers, and melancholy 

 marked me for her own. Like Cowper, patriot and 

 poet, I loved England still, "though," as on several 

 previous occasions, " deformed by sullen rains ; " but 

 I was no longer enamoured of that portion of my 

 country which is allotted to "bedding-out." 



So I became a sadder and a wiser gardener. I 

 meekly confessed, " Great nature is more wise than 

 I," and felt heartily ashamed of my disparagements 

 of my floral ancestors, recalling painfully one of their 

 trite aphorisms, " Young men think that old men are 

 fools, but old men know that young men are foolish." 

 I made new beds, I enlarged my borders, and, only a 

 year after that fatal storm, young men and maidens 

 were playing tennis on the scene of the disaster. 

 The exiles were recalled, and the natural, the English, 

 system of gardening, which gives us something to 

 admire in ten months out of the twelve, once more 



" With nobler gi-ace 

 Diffused its artless beauties o'er the place." 



These henceforth absorbed my allegiancs and 



