GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
My brothers’ romance took an active form; they were embued 
with a fine spirit of adventure, and some of the escapades into which 
it led them—egged on frequently by a boyish love of mischief— 
would make entertaining reading, but would be out of place here. 
How and when the rumour first reached us of a beautiful garden 
in our neighbourhood, and of its wonderful entrance gates, or why 
we were convinced that its gates were golden, I do not exactly 
remember. It is all so very, very long ago. But some of us had 
heard of the Garden of the Hesperides, and of the golden apples 
therein, guarded by a dreadful dragon with a hundred heads, and 
we communicated the wondrous fable to the others. Possibly, 
also, the Florentine Ghiberti’s “‘ Gates of Paradise ’’ may have been 
mentioned before us, and we caught at the word “ Paradise.” 
‘* Paradise ?”’ we reflected. ‘‘ That is heaven; Jerusalem the 
golden,”’ described in the Book of the Revelation, which in itself 
was to us but a glorified and very mystical fairy-tale, telling of a 
place where everything glittered with gold and precious stones— 
just as it does in fairyland. Moreover, “ Paradise’ was the 
Garden of Eden—the happy garden that men lost. And might 
it not be up to us to regain it? I think it was by some such 
process of reasoning, and by that quaint commingling of ideas to 
which even grown-up people are unconsciously prone, that we 
arrived at the conclusion that the garden we had heard of was a 
sort of enchanted Eden, and that its gates were gates of gold. 
Not one of us, I am sure, believed that in it was a dragon, as 
in the classical story, or a serpent, as in Eden; though the boys 
would fain have done so, in order to give scope for valorous deeds, 
if ever they reached it. But more or less we all believed that 
golden apples might grow in that garden; for had we not at home 
pippins called “ golden ”’ by courtesy, and in humble imitation of 
the Hesperidian reality ? 
Perhaps I have dwelt too long on all this, and on that happy 
garden of my childhood that I have been describing—but it was 
necessary to explain how it happened that, though we knew nothing 
of the Duke of Devonshire, and had never heard of his famous 
Palladian Villa, yet, when vague reports concerning the beautiful 
gates of a garden even more enchanting and wonderful than our 
own, reached us from time to time, and when we heard them 
continually as we slowly grew older—too slowly in those days—we 
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