GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 



countermarchings, and to note the various stages of practice and 

 efficiency when infantry and artillery were engaged on different 

 parts of the ground in the mysterious evolutions that, to the un- 

 initiated, appear so purposeless. 



But alas ! Where once in years that now seem so very, very 

 long ago the cows must have ruminated among the buttercups, 

 or where the deep clover grass in early June turned to that wonder- 

 ful warm tint that heralds the hay-making season the turf has 

 disappeared, and the ground is brown and bare ; it has been trampled 

 under foot by hundreds of men, torn up by the hoofs of the horses, 

 seamed and scored by the wheels of gun-carriages, and the dividing 

 wire fence is broken down in many places by the troops who 

 leant upon it, using it as a resting-place. Yet where I sat at work; 

 farther on in the interior of the grounds, the distant sounds and 

 sights of war could not intimidate or frighten the thrushes ; they 

 sang as blithely, answering each other across the garden, as though 

 no such dire calamity as war had ever existed : behind me, from 

 the fine old fifteenth-century tower of Fulham Church, the hours 

 and quarters were chimed out, as regularly and musically as ever 

 they had been in the piping times of peace. And by degrees, as 

 I worked, the hush of high, warm noon would steal over every- 

 thing, and for a while I heard only the murmurous voices of 

 the summer, those manifold sounds of insect life that one's ear 

 is not attuned to catch at other times. Thus soothed and engrossed 

 for nature is all absorbing, and brooks no rival when one is study- 

 ing her it was possible to forget, for a space, the black pall of 

 sorrow and wickedness that man's own hand had drawn across 

 the beautiful world till, all too soon, the distant call of the bugle 

 in the home park, and, down the avenue, the " tramp, tramp " 

 of a company of soldiers following a military band, recalled me to 

 the consciousness that England was at war, and all that that meant ! 



Passing the modern flower-garden close to the house, under the 

 pointed windows of what was once, I believe, the chapel where 

 there are bedded-out plants, and the gay and strongly-contrasting 

 geraniums and calceolarias so dear to many excellent gardeners' 

 hearts and following a gravel path bounded on the left by 

 the park and the wire fence before mentioned one passes on the 

 right a beautifully- kept stretch of velvet grass, with the tennis lawn 

 beyond it, some cedars, and other non-deciduous trees and arrives 



88 



