4 o 
THE HEART OF A GARDEN 
the year’s youth will have been wrought yet again, and 
we shall pass onward to the maturer and more material 
joys of summer. 
It was one too generous week of warm days, days 
that outshone many and many a temperate July, that 
hurried away untimely my nodding rows of daffodils 
and early narcissi, killed by the sun’s unseasonable kind¬ 
ness ; but the long pale green sheaths of the double 
gardenia-flowered narcissus are full of pleasant promise 
to be fulfilled in the near future. The earlier tulips, 
too, went not unscathed, although the fierce light that 
beat upon their crowns made more for detriment to 
form than actual withering. The fine reticence of the 
slim closed chalice, mysteriously swathed, was taken 
from them by those imperious rays; but none the less 
they made a brave show among the lawns and in their 
proper borders, for all the world like myriads of faery 
lanterns, lit by the sun and giving back the borrowed 
lustre with an added radiance of their own. Amber, 
amethyst, topaz, white onyx, amaranth, and porphyry 
—these are but a few colours of the tulip-lamps that 
glow together in the sun; while, as you tread the 
smooth sward between them, you might well think to 
have stepped into a story from the Arabian Nights. 
Indeed, I believe a barbaric taste in tulips—and I must 
needs own that mine so inclines—is no bad thing, pro¬ 
vided always that it is sufficiently intemperate. And I 
have still in grateful remembrance a certain bed once 
planned in defiance of all the laws of harmony and 
tradition, which, none the less, became a joy to the be¬ 
holder. Wildly gay as a macaw or as some Persian 
