THE EFFECT OF TREES 



recognises them readily because they have stepped out 

 of pictures on his walls, and when they are not haunting 

 the garden are demurely hanging on the oak panels in 

 the old rooms. 



Then he can see, if he chooses, a picture of the garden 

 when the acacia tree is quite tall, but still elegant and 

 slender, and in this picture an old, old lady walks down 

 the garden paths. She is dressed in a large hooped 

 skirt with panniers, and has high-heeled shoes, and a 

 perfect tower of hair on her head, and over that a calash 

 hood like the hood over a waggon except that it is black. 

 She carries an ebony stick in a silk-mittened hand, a 

 hand knotted with gout and covered with the mourning 

 rings of her friends. She it was who added largely to 

 the garden, and took in two acres more of land, and 

 planted a row of Elms and Beech trees. She kept the 

 garden as bright and gay as the samplers she worked her- 

 self. She had a mania for set beds, and her Tulips were 

 the talk of the county. A long bed of them ran from 

 the house along one bank of the bowling-green to the 

 orchard, and it was arranged in pattern of colours, lines, 

 squares, interlaced geometrical designs of flaming red and 

 scarlet, pink and yellow and white and dull purple. 

 She it was who caused the sundial to be placed in the 

 garden and who found the motto for it, and designed the 

 four triangular beds to go round it, and placed a hedge 

 of Lavender and Rosemary all about it in a square. 



The tap of her stick on the paths is one of the ghostly 

 sounds that haunt the place, and sometimes it is difficult 

 to know whether it is a woodpecker, or a thrush breaking 

 open a snail, or her stick that makes such a sharp crisp 

 sound on the Summer air. 



There is another sound, too, that the Acacia tree 

 knows well. It is the click of glasses under its boughs. 

 On a table placed under the tree is an array of beautiful 



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