tend all of them, large and small alike, to fall within a more or Dublin Bay 
less well-marked category. If no turbulent and sombre Atlantic 
is at hand to lend them dignity, there are at least the never- 
failingly attractive vicissitudes of the tides to give width and 
variety to the backgrounds. Sauntering beside their flower 
borders your eye instinctively travels onward, and gets caught 
and momentarily entangled amid an intricacy of sandbars and 
salt-water lakes, marbled with sun and passing clouds, or rests 
upon brown fishing-sails or some far-off trail of smoke, details 
which are never for ten consecutive minutes quite the same. 
Again, peering over any of their frontiers, you will almost to a 
certainty perceive, beyond the nearest embankment of Fuchsia, 
Tamarisk, and so on, a crowd of small waves in the act of either 
rushing eagerly forward to bombard it, or else of retreating to 
lose themselves amid long yellow ridges and shining expanses 
of sand, where, growing disheartened, they by and by melt away 
and perish. Details such as these, if only as a variation of the too 
familiar meadowy and hedgerow backgrounds, seem to bring a 
new flavour into gardening. The horticulturist may be—very 
likely is—entirely absorbed in some intricate plan of colour 
combination, or the yet deeper mysteries of propagation, yet all 
the while some little corner of his brain will have escaped from 
these labours, and will be occupying itself with who shall say 
what sea-going excursions, what, to himself unknown, voyages 
and divagations. 
In the case of one large and often-described garden lying 
to the north of Dublin’ this sense of the neighbourhood of a 
restless element takes on a larger and more stately aspect. Here, 
through gaps in a line of Beech trees, not alone the nearer and 
1 St Ann’s, 
t3 
