GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 



My brothers' romance took an active form ; they were embued 

 with a fine spirit of adventure, and some of the escapades into which 

 it led them egged on frequently by a boyish love of mischief 

 would make entertaining reading, but would be out of place here. 



How and when the rumour first reached us of a beautiful garden 

 in our neighbourhood, and of its wonderful entrance gates, or why 

 we were convinced that its gates were golden, I do not exactly 

 remember. It is all so very, very long ago. But some of us had 

 heard of the Garden of the Hesperides, and of the golden apples 

 therein, guarded by a dreadful dragon with a hundred heads, and 

 we communicated the wondrous fable to the others. Possibly, 

 also, the Florentine Ghiberti's " Gates of Paradise " may have been 

 mentioned before us, and we caught at the word " Paradise." 

 " Paradise ? ' we reflected. c That is heaven ; Jerusalem the 

 golden," described in the Book of the Revelation, which in itself 

 was to us but a glorified and very mystical fairy-tale, telling of a 

 place where everything glittered with gold and precious stones 

 just as it does in fairyland. Moreover, " Paradise " was the 

 Garden of Eden the happy garden that men lost. And might 

 it not be up to us to regain it ? I think it was by some such 

 process of reasoning, and by that quaint commingling of ideas to 

 which even grown-up people are unconsciously prone, that we 

 arrived at the conclusion that the garden we had heard of was a 

 sort of enchanted Eden, and that its gates were gates of gold. 



Not one of us, I am sure, believed that in it was a dragon, as 

 in the classical story, or a serpent, as in Eden ; though the boys 

 would fain have done so, in order to give scope for valorous deeds, 

 if ever they reached it. But more or less we all believed that 

 golden apples might grow in that garden ; for had we not at home 

 pippins called " golden " by courtesy, and in humble imitation of 

 the Hesperidian reality ? 



Perhaps I have dwelt too long on all this, and on that happy 

 garden of my childhood that I have been describing but it was 

 necessary to explain how it happened that, though we knew nothing 

 of the Duke of Devonshire, and had never heard of his famous 

 Palladian Villa, yet, when vague reports concerning the beautiful 

 gates of a garden even more enchanting and wonderful than our 

 own, reached us from time to time, and when we heard them 

 continually as we slowly grew older too slowly in those days we 



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