126 
THE HEART OF A GARDEN 
Very beautiful are the late lilies that fill the carved stone 
urns along the terrace with sweetness and light, their white 
frosted petals all set about, as it were, and gemmed with 
rubies; but the present pride of my heart, that will all too 
soon be over and gone, is my prodigious bed of phloxes. 
Never can I be too glad that that heroic sacrifice of 
open space was made between the desert and the sown, 
the kitchen garden and the wilderness. And the 
oblation of a grass plot upon so lovely a shrine was not 
so very considerable, after all, for in the earlier year all 
manner of narcissi and daffodils blow there; while now 
it is a field of flowing, tossing colour, such a sea of 
glory as is almost too beautiful for belief. 
The tall, clustering blossom-heads lean this way and 
that as the breeze sways them, bringing to light each 
moment some fresh harmony of colour. Rose-red and 
snow-white, cherry, coral, and vermilion, royal purple, 
faint lavender, tender puce and deep violet, pale rose, 
ruby-eyed, pearl with violet eye—they are too many 
to tell of. Even magenta softens its asperities and takes 
on new comeliness cast in this radiant kaleidoscope. 
Decidedly, this plot was well worth the making. 
The autumn is not yet old, but there are signs in plenty 
to show that it is already well upon its way. And of these 
the most infallible and clamant is the robin’s song. You 
would think him rejoicing because summer is over to 
hear him pay such sedulous court to the new season. 
A while since he sang the new moon in—-a pale and 
slender sickle veiled with mist, a hand’s cast, as it were, 
beyond the crooked apple-bough—with so fine a 
fervour that almost he persuaded me to his opinion. 
