100O.] ESSAYS. 35 



picturesqueness and attractiveness, in fact, for all elements of 

 natural beauty, we can find the host and some of the worst upon 

 this continent; yet, to go through all the States 1 have visited, 

 is to the floriculturist a disappointment in a very large measure. 

 We have not the cultivated and created, the made beauty, that 

 they have in many of the old lands, and with all our advantages 

 of wealth and leisure it is a disgrace to us. I hope I may live 

 long enough to take another trip or two across the Atlantic, that 

 my eyes may rest once more on the English landscape in its 

 unusually high degree of beauty, in the month of May or June. 

 Let me tell you people, who may cross the Atlantic to visit the 

 old land, if you want to see it in all its splendors you must not 

 take the tourists' months of July and August. You must go 

 there in May or June, and you will find a scene of ravishing 

 beauty, which I will not attempt to describe to you ; but every 

 landscape is a perfect picture, and where the fields are divided 

 by hedge-rows it looks as though a framework of silver was all 

 around a scene of green. The villages, indeed, are rapture 

 itself to wander through, and upon some light spring evening, 

 if you stroll about, you will see that every cottage garden is a 

 perfect bouquet; every window is burdened with bloom, the 

 people all trying to make the general effect as perfect as possi- 

 ble. And this is the ideal I have in my mind, sir, for an 

 American village; they call them "gardens" over there. I 

 hardly understood, it is a long time since I came to this country, 

 and I hardly understood what a door-yard meant — I do now ; I 

 believe that people call them "door-yards" because they are 

 ashamed to call them gardens. This is one of the exhibitions of 

 unconscious modesty, such as you seldom find on this continent. 

 I had to go through a door-yard a short time ago, and I don't 

 like to tell what I saw. I don't like to describe the things I 

 found there, but there was the rubbish of the house — the young- 

 est of it was twenty-five years' old — that portion of it was a 

 pair of boots which grandfather used to wear, and grandfather 

 had been dead twenty-five years ; and then there were two of 

 those circular arrangements that ladies used to wear about 

 twenty-five years ago, and broken crockery-ware and things of 



