Climate than sufferers under his more normal condition might suppose. 
and I remember a summer—it was a good many summers ago— 
Gardens when for weeks at a time not a shower fell. The loughs 
sank low in their beds; the bogs, seamed with cracks, showed 
as dry as so many high roads; the grass turned brown; the 
flowers withered ; the mountains—the scene was Connemara— 
stood out, with every muscle of their stony anatomy brought 
into the strongest possible relief; now and then a wind got 
up, but no rain fell; every atom of moisture seemed to have 
vanished out of the atmosphere, and from morning till night the 
sun shone down with the same broad, unwinking persistency. 
It was exactly what every one had always been wishing and 
sighing for, but somehow when it came no one appeared to be 
particularly gratified, and I recall no very genuine expression 
of regret when at last one morning we got up to find the 
sky had lost its brazen look, and that the familiar greys and 
greyish greens had once more resumed their dominion. 
But it is of gardens, and the effects of climate upon 
them, that I believe myself at the present moment to be 
writing! The particular garden which I would ask the 
reader to imaginatively explore with me lies, not in the pro- 
fessedly picturesque western half of the county of Galway, 
but in its much flatter, though hardly less stone-ridden, inland 
or eastern region. Owing, perhaps, to this superabundance of 
stones, or more probably to the fact of none of them being 
very far from the storm-breeding Atlantic, it has come to pass 
that nearly all the gardens—flower ones, be it understood, 
not merely utilitarian ones—in this county of Galway 
are walled gardens. There may be said, in fact, to be 
nearly as many walled flower-gardens in it as there are 
4 
