THE LURE OF THE GARDEN 
from Omar’s Persian “ Look to the blowing Rose about 
us . . to the sage reflections of a “ Commuter’s Wife.” 
Unlike any other garden in any other book is the one 
told of in Barrie’s “ Little White Bird,” where one finds 
not only such astonishing things as the “Hump” and 
the “Baby’s Palace,” and the wonderful map with 
Round Pond in the center, but one’s own childhood, mi¬ 
raculously alive and merry, hardly a stranger and more 
beautiful than one would have believed. Other magic 
gardens there are, in Arabian tales and fairy stories, all 
of them joyful places to know and to visit; but the last 
garden we will enter is a compromise between magic and 
reality, being that one made by Count Anteoni on the edge 
of the Sahara, where Domine went to live with her 
child after her love story was finished, as is told in 
“The Garden of Allah.” 
“ She stood on a great expanse of newly raked smooth 
sand, rising in a very gentle slope to a gigantic hedge of 
carefully trimmed evergreens, which projected at the top, 
forming a roof and casting a pleasant shade upon the 
ground. At intervals white benches were placed under 
this hedge . . . there were masses of trees to the left, 
where a little raised sand-path with flattened, sloping 
sides wound away into a maze of shadows diapered with 
gold . . . behind the evergreen hedge she heard the 
liquid bubbling of a hidden water-fall, and when she had 
left the untempered sunshine behind her this murmur 
grew louder. It seemed as if the green gloom in which 
182 
