340 
Old Time Gardens 
Gooseberry bushes. I seldom see Gooseberry 
bushes nowadays in any gardens, whether on farms 
or in nurseries ; they seem to be an antiquated fruit. 
I have in my memory many other customs of 
childhood in the garden ; some of them I have told 
in my book Child Life in Colonial Days , and there 
are scores more which I have not recounted, but 
most of them were peculiar to my own fanciful 
childhood, and I will not recount them here. 
One of the most exquisite of Mrs. Browning’s 
poems is The Lost Bower ; it is endeared to me be- 
cause it expresses so fully a childish bereavement 
of my own, for I have a lost garden. Somewhere, 
in my childhood, I saw this beautiful garden, filled 
with radiant blossoms, rich with fruit and berries, 
set with beehives, rabbit hutches, and a dove cote, 
and enclosed about with hedges ; and through it 
ran a purling brook — a thing I ever longed for in 
my home garden. All one happy summer after- 
noon I played in it, and gathered from its beds and 
borders at will — and I have never seen it since. 
When I was still a child I used to ask to return to 
it, but no one seemed to understand ; and when I 
was grown I asked where it was, describing it in 
every detail, and the only answer was that it was 
a dream, I had never seen and played in such a 
garden. This lost garden has become to me an 
emblem, as was the lost bower to Mrs. Browning, 
of the losses of life; but I did not lose all; while 
memory lasts I shall ever possess the happiness of 
my childhood passed in our home garden. 
