Stray Leaves from a Border Garden 
there are often to be found these gardens, havens of rest, 
where one feels, as one enters the old mossy avenue, that the 
tumult of the outer world will scarcely penetrate beyond 
the moss-grown walls and yew hedges. There are no 
children here to pull about the beds and pluck the flowers, 
the young birds have all flown and the old pair are alone 
in their old ivied house. Mr. Moss is away, in the Knights 
Acre, or the Little Croft, or some such quaintly- called portion 
of his surrounding domain, wandering very probably along 
the banks of his favourite brown trout stream. Mrs. Moss 
comes to meet us, her skirts daintily pinned up, and laden 
with flower-scissors, basket, and trowel. “ Doing a little 
gardening, my dear ! ” she says. She proposes adjourning 
to the upstair drawing-room, where the striped blinds are 
down to protect the old carpet from the Spring sun, but 
her eyes sparkle when the sincere request is made to stay 
out and see the garden. The Myrtle has almost over- 
grown the porch, and she says with a smile, Mr. Moss’s 
mother planted it. By Mr. Moss she always means her 
husband ; this type of old lady would think shame (as the 
graphic t old Scottish idiom hath it) to speak of her husband 
as Tom, Dick, or Harry. But new years new customs; 
perhaps the wives of Tom, Dick, and Harry, for all their 
rough speech, may not be less true-hearted. In front of 
the door, and so placed that the little drive winds round 
them, is an old-fashioned round plot subdivided by tiny 
paths into six V-shaped beds, like slices of cake, bordered 
by box. Here there are a few cherished Standard Rose- 
trees, of which Mrs. Moss knows every name, and dwells 
fondly on their glories in the seasons that have been, and 
prophesies what will be in the days to come. But the 
present beauty of these beds is Spring loveliness — well- 
fed clumps of golden Oxslips and velvety Polyanthus, 
scarlet Tulips, and intermixed masses of blue Forget-me- 
nots. The latter has overrun the little paths, and Mrs. 
Moss uproots sundry intruding plants and says they must 
be thrown away, it is too luxuriant. And thrown aside 
they will be, on a heap of refuse by a hedge, and will take 
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