House & Garden 
the beginning its leading spirit. The owner’s 
nature is reflected everywhere in all the details 
of the house and grounds. Thus the indi¬ 
viduality of the place is indissolubly estab¬ 
lished. Modest retirement is the note which 
pervades it. Simplicity and absence of pre¬ 
tence are everywhere apparent. The house 
itself is neither large nor elaborate ; but the 
house when finished was only a bare form, 
around which all the natural charms of the 
place have since been carefully trained by a 
patient growth. Even the garden, which in 
our pride we often put in front of our houses 
to dazzle the approaching stranger with the 
utmost we can muster, is here concealed well 
within those exterior parts of the house 
which first meet public view. Nor at last 
does it spread out in meretricious show 
before a terrace or a drawing-room window. 
Great formality has been avoided to gain that 
intime character in which all the beauties of 
the garden culminate, and to which a certain 
irregularity gives interrupted views adding 
the charm of the unexpected. It is a place 
to walk in, to live in, and be happy in, 
unconventional in its planting, easy in its 
growth and free from foreign objects which 
any native house gardener of these last hun¬ 
dred years would have scorned. 
Moreover this home has suffered no 
second-handed tending by which an owner 
directs his servants to carry out his wishes. 
Beyond the house itself, built from designs 
of Mr. Wilson Eyre and finished about 
Christmas 1893, there is nothing at North- 
cote which has not been carried out under the 
enthusiastic eyes and supervision of its owner. 
Ele has set the plants with his own hand ; 
furniture and bookshelves have been made 
by him; he has painted walls and doors in 
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