GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
-ecountermarchings, and to note the various stages of practice and 
éfficiency—when infantry and artillery were engaged on different 
parts of the ground—in the mysterious evolutions that, to the un- 
initiated, appear so purposeless. 
But alas! Where once—in years that now seem so very, very 
long ago—the cows must have ruminated among the ‘buttercups, 
‘or where the deep clover grass in early June turned to that wonder- 
ful warm tint that heralds the hay-making season—the turf has 
disappeared, and the ground is brown and bare; it has been trampled 
under foot by hundreds of men, torn up by the hoofs of the horses, 
seamed and scored by the wheels of gun-carriages, and the dividing 
“wire fence is broken down in many places by the troops who 
leant upon it, using it as a resting-place. Yet where I sat at work, 
farther on. in the interior of the grounds, the distant sounds and 
sights of war.could not intimidate. or frighten the thrushes ; they 
‘sang as blithely, answering each other across the garden, as though 
no- such dire ealamity.as war had ever existed: behind me, from 
‘the fine old fifteenth-century tower of Fulham Church, the hours 
and quarters were chimed out, as regularly and musically as ever 
they had been in the piping times of peace. And by degrees, as 
I worked, the hush of high, warm noon would steal over. every- 
thing, and for a while I heard only the murmurous voices of 
the summer, those manifold sounds of insect life that one’s ear 
is not attuned to catch at other times. Thus soothed and engrossed 
—for nature is all absorbing, and brooks no rival when one is study- 
ing her—it was possible to forget, for a space, the black pall of 
sorrow and wickedness that man’s own hand had drawn across 
the beautiful world—till, all too soon, the distant call of the bugle 
in the home park, and, down the avenue, the “‘ tramp, tramp” 
of a company of soldiers following a military band, recalled me to 
the consciousness that England was at war, and all that that meant ! 
Passing the modern flower-garden close to the house, under the 
pointed windows of what was once, I believe, the chapel—where 
there are bedded-out plants, and the gay and strongly-contrasting 
geraniums and calceolarias so dear to many excellent gardeners’ 
hearts—and following a gravel path bounded on the left by 
the park and the wire fence before mentioned—one passes on the 
right a beautifully-kept stretch of velvet grass, with the tennis lawn 
beyond it, some cedars, and other non-deciduous trees—and_ arrives 
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