“All in ye Merrie Month of May ” 
with its thistle of green on field of gold. But I have strayed 
far afield from the old garden ; there were no thistles there. 
I suppose the flowers had once been in prim single tufts in 
these borders, but when I knew them the rich red, purple 
and white Globe Anemones were encroaching on the pink 
Dogtooth Violets and elbowing the Crocus and Double 
Primroses, while the bright little Grape Jacinths had spread 
till it seemed a patch of blue sky had come down from earth. 
Then there were clumps of literally giant Cowslips and 
Polyanthus among the parsley, and dear “ Dusty Millers.” 
There were Violets, too, under the wall, the “ Choice 
Flower of Delight ” ; and Double Wood Anemones, Wind- 
flowers or Flawflowers, from the idea that even a flaw of 
wind moved them ; and patches of Alyssum and bee-haunted 
Scillas, white Honeyflower, lying in pink tufts along the 
border ; and last, but not least, the dear little old-fashioned 
Canadian Puccoon or Bloodwort, looking like a tiny white 
Waterlily strayed from the water. The paths were all inlaid, 
in a curious fashion, in a mosaic of stones. How painstaking 
must have been the gardener who worked out that intricate 
pattern, or how fanciful the master ! “ And how cheap 
labour was in those days compared to now ! ” remarked a 
prosaic soul to whom I made the above comment on my 
paradise. I had a vision of the master, a grey recluse 
loving his garden ; like Dionysius, more interested in the 
fate of his cabbages than the welfare of the empire ; and I 
felt the man who rides a hobby should be envied of those 
fellow-creatures who have none, since for him the sometime 
dull web of life is shot with iridescent threads — iridescent to 
him though invisible, in some lights, to others. Then I 
heard of a gay family of daughters who had played about 
that garden long ago, and gathered primroses and daffodils 
in the surrounding neighbourhood, and lived in the old 
tumble-down mansion-house with its ivied turrets ; and, as I 
gazed down the beech avenue into the blue distance, I 
became aware of a tall grey woman disappearing through 
the old blue door into the garden. And I remembered how 
I had heard tell of one sister of all the merry band, yet 
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