II 



THE GARDEN OF ENGLAND: THE 

 PATCHWORK QUILT 



Even your most unadventurous fellow can hardly look 

 on a fair prospect of fields and meadows, woods, villages 

 with smoking chimneys, a river, and a road, without a 

 certain feeling rising in him that he would like to tread 

 the road that winds so dapperly through the country, 

 and discover for himself where it leads. 



To those who love their country the road is but a 

 garden path running between borders of fair flowers 

 whose names and virtues should be known to every 

 child. 



A poet can weave a story from the speck of mud on a 

 fellow traveller's boot — the red soil of a Devonshire lane 

 calls up such pictures of fern-covered banks, such 

 rushing streams, as make a poem in themselves. 



It strikes one from the very first how neatly most 

 of England is kept. The dip and rise of softly swelling 

 hills across which the curling ribbon of the road winds 

 leisurely between neat hedges, the fields in patches, 

 coloured brown and green, golden with Corn, scarlet 

 with Poppies, yellow with Buttercups ; the circular 

 bunches of trees under whose shade fat cattle stand 

 lazily switching their tails at flies ; the woods, hangers, 

 shaws and coppices, glades, dells, dingles and combes, 

 all set out so orderly and precise that, from a hill, the 

 country has the appearance of a patchwork quilt set in 



10 



