VIII 

 THE COTTAGE GARDEN 



For the same reason that your town man keeps a pot 

 of Geraniums on his window-sill, and a caged bird in 

 his house, your countryman plants bright-coloured 

 flowers by his door, and regales his children with news 

 of the first cuckoo. They pull as much of Heaven down 

 as will accommodate itself to their plot of earth. 



Any man standing in the centre of however small a 

 space of his personal ownership — a piece of drugget 

 in a garret, a patch of garden — makes it the hub of the 

 universe round which the stars spin, on which his world 

 revolves. Within a hand-stretch of him lie all he is, 

 his intimate possessions, his scraps of comfort scratched 

 out of the hard earth : books, pictures, photographs 

 showing the faces of his small world of friends and his 

 tiny travels — how little difference- there is between a 

 walk through Piccadilly and a journey across Asia : 

 your great traveller has little more to say than the 

 man who has found Heaven in a penny bunch of Violets, 

 or heard the stars whisper over St. James's Park — 

 within his reach are the things he has paid the price of 

 life for, and they are the cloak with which he covers his 

 nakedness of soul against the all-seeing eye he calls his 

 Destiny. 



With all this, commenced perhaps in cowardice — 

 for the earth's brown crust is too like a grave, the garret 

 floor too like a shell of wood — your man, town or 



54, 



