THE COTTAGE GARDEN 



wife, have been on the very spot far, far longer than the 

 Pinks and Gilly-flowers, blooming into ripe age, rearing 

 countless families back and back and back, until one 

 can almost see a Giles sacrificing to Thor and Odin at 

 the stone on the hill behind the cottage. The Norman 

 Church throws its shadow over the graves of countless 

 Gileses, and over the graves, pleasant-eyed English 

 Daisies shine on the grass. 



After all, when we see a cottage standing in its 

 glowing garden, with a neat hedge cutting it off from 

 its fellows; with children playing eternal games with 

 dolls (Mr. Mould's children following the ledger to its 

 long home in the safe shall I ever forget that ?), we 

 see the whole world, cares, joys, birth, death and 

 marriage ; the wealth of nations scattered carelessly 

 in flowers, spoils from every continent, surrounded 

 by a hedge, its own birds to sing, its hundred forms of 

 life, feeding, breeding, dying round the cottage door ; 

 and, at night, its little patch of stars overhead. 



It was a fanciful child, perhaps, but children are full 

 of quaint ideas, who caught the moon in a bright tin 

 spoon, and put it in a bottle, and drew the cork at night 

 to let the moon out to sail in the sky. The child found 

 the tin spoon, dropped by a passing tinware pedlar, 

 in the road, waited till night came, with his head full 

 of a fairy story he had heard, and when it was dark, 

 except for the moon, he stepped into the garden, held 

 the bowl of the spoon to catch the moon's reflection, 

 and when she showed her yellow face distorted in the 

 bright spoon, he poured the reflection, very solemnly, 

 into a bottle and corked it fast and tight. Then, 

 with a whispered fairy spell, some nurse's gibberish, 

 he took the precious bottle and hid it in a cupboard 

 along with other mysterious tokens. That's a symbol 

 of all our lives, bottling up moons and letting them out 



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