THE LURE OF THE GARDEN 



from Omar's Persian " Look to the blowing Rose about 

 us . . ." to the sage reflections of a " Commuter's Wife." 



Unlike any other garden in any other book is the one 

 told of in Barrie's " Little White Bird," where one finds 

 not only such astonishing things as the "Hump" and 

 the "Baby's Palace," and the wonderful map with 

 Round Pond in the center, but one's own childhood, mi- 

 raculously alive and merry, hardly a stranger and more 

 beautiful than one would have believed. Other magic 

 gardens there are, in Arabian tales and fairy stories, all 

 of them joyful places to know and to visit; but the last 

 garden we will enter is a compromise between magic and 

 reality, being that one made by Count Anteoni on the edge 

 of the Sahara, where Domine went to live with her 

 child after her love story was finished, as is told in 

 "The Garden of Allah." 



" She stood on a great expanse of newly raked smooth 

 sand, rising in a very gentle slope to a gigantic hedge of 

 carefully trimmed evergreens, which projected at the top, 

 forming a roof and casting a pleasant shade upon the 

 ground. At intervals white benches were placed under 

 this hedge . . . there were masses of trees to the left, 

 where a little raised sand-path with flattened, sloping 

 sides wound away into a maze of shadows diapered with 

 gold . . . behind the evergreen hedge she heard the 

 liquid bubbling of a hidden water-fall, and when she had 

 left the untempered sunshine behind her this murmur 

 grew louder. It seemed as if the green gloom in which 



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