GHISWICK HOUSE 



the handsome scarlet Japonica, beneath the dining-room window 

 (the lovely waxen flowers of which I early essayed to paint) ; 

 and over one of the two windows of the kitchen, trailed a yellow 

 jessamine. A doorway led into the stable yard, that was separated 

 from the garden by an old fence, that, as years glided by, bent more 

 and more beneath the weight of some patriarchal ivy. Hard by 

 grew a flowering currant-bush, the first shrub in our garden to 

 bloom in early Spring, and give a welcome signal of the departure 

 of Winter. 



At one side of the garden there was a plantation of box trees, 

 very dense and thick, and since box is an extremely slow-growing 

 plant undoubtedly of great antiquity. They were about ten or 

 twelve feet high, and must therefore have been in the garden at a 

 period even anterior to the destruction by fire of the first mansion 

 on the estate. In our youthful imagination this little thicket, 

 although in reality but a few yards square, was a deep, dark, 

 mysterious wood almost an enchanted forest, and the scene of 

 various singular and dangerous adventures, that, however tragic, 

 generally ended happily ; in these we, of course, invariably played 

 the leading parts. The events that took place in that forest were 

 so wildly improbable, that only the fertile and illogical brain of 

 childhood, could have conceived them. They were first suggested, 

 no doubt, by fairy tales. How potent such suggestions can be, 

 few grown-ups remember or realize ; but to us, happy boys and 

 girls as we were, they stood for much ; they left us open to belief 

 in the possibility of real adventures to be met with outside the 

 boundaries of our own beloved garden, and as time passed on 

 inspired us with the desire to prosecute them actively. 



I myself was fed on fairy tales, and I still possess a copy of 

 Hans Christian Andersen, a birthday gift from an uncle, bearing 

 on the fly-leaf the inscription : 



" With the sincere and earnest hope that these little 

 tales may get firmly fixed in her little head." 



And the wish was verified ! But I delighted also in the " Arabian 

 Nights," in Grimm, and the delectable stories of the Countess 

 d'Aulnoy, the latter, a volume beautifully illustrated, by, if I 

 remember rightly, Sir John Gilbert. 



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