14 THE GARDEN OF A 



love for spinky foliage beds left me, planning what I 

 should do in the " some day " that always seemed a 

 matter of course to me. The very first thing that I 

 should do in that happy time would be to send away 

 the gardener, and then I would have an iron pot 

 painted red, with red geraniums in it and conch 

 shells to edge the beds, like those in the garden of 

 the grocer's wife, for my taste was then in the Indian 

 war-paint stage. 



When autumn came and outdoors put on her iron 

 mask to shield herself from cold, I crept back to the 

 study and made friends again with books, and read 

 each new catalogue, lying flat on my face upon an 

 old hair-cloth lounge, with Timperley's "Dictionary 

 of Printing" (which, being lumpy, heavy, and weak 

 in the back, was constantly falling off its shelf) for a 

 reading-desk. Ah ! web of Fate ! it was well that I 

 did not see you weaving the pattern of my life among 

 those pages ; being young, I might have resented you 

 and spoiled the fabric. 



One day father discovered in a catalogue among 

 some curious medical books a copy of Dodoens's 

 " Herball." This he had long wanted for its absurdly 

 quaint descriptions of the medical properties of plants. 

 It was the English translation made by Henry Lite 

 and printed in London in 1586. It bore the auto- 



