THE BOWLING-GREEN 347 



primroses, wood anemones, wild hyacinths, and 

 aconites. 



On the west side of the house, is a bowling- 

 green of inviolate antiquity, soft and mossy, well- 

 suited for the sleepy game of bowls, in which our 

 forefathers delighted, ill-suited for the more 

 boisterous or active games of to-day. It must 

 have been, I fancy, one of the crowning insults of 

 the suitors of Penelope that they " played quoits 

 and hurled their javelins " on the bowling-green of 

 Penelope's long-absent husband, Ulysses ; and 

 cricket and lawn tennis seem an almost equal 

 profanation to the soft and soporific turf of this. 

 " How do you get turf like this?" asked an eager, 

 inquisitive, pushful Yankee of the porter of a college 

 which boasted of one of the most beautiful gardens 

 in Cambridge; "we can't get any like this in our 

 country." "We mows," answered the porter, with 

 patriotic pride, with pardonable exaggeration, and, 

 perhaps, not altogether unintelligible contempt for 

 the great republic of yesterday and its almighty 

 dollar; "we mows and we rolls for a thousand 

 years." If the bowling-green of Bingham's Mel- 

 combe can look back, as it does, upon half that 

 thousand years, it does pretty well. 



But the most distinctive feature of the garden 



