Transcriber’s Notes

OUR
SENTIMENTAL
GARDEN

THE HEMICYCLE

OUR SENTIMENTAL
GARDEN

BY AGNES AND

EGERTON

CASTLE

Illustrated by

Charles Robinson

PHILADELPHIA: J. B. LIPPINCOTT CO

LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN

MCMXIV

Printed in England

To our Kind Neighbours, of Rogate,

SIR HUGH & LADY WYNDHAM

who viewed the “Villino” garden,

even from the beginning, with indulgent

eyes; and, with friendliest tact,

persisted in descrying possibilities of

grace in the wildest tangle, this

chronicle is affectionately inscribed

in pleasant remembrance

of too rare visits.

September

1914

Villino Loki

Over the hills and far away,

A place of flowers crowns a rise;

And there our year, from May to May,

Comes with a breath of Paradise;

There the small helpless soul that lies

So sweetly, innocently gay,

In little furry things at play,

With perfect trust can meet our eyes;

Over the hills and far away,

Over the hills.

Over the hills and far away,

In every rose a dream we prize,

While thousand tender memories

Flutter about the lilac-spray;

To-day, to-morrow, yesterday—

Each unto each make glad replies;

Over the hills and far away,

Over the hills.

Elinor Sweetman

Never was trifling chronicle begun so light-heartedly as this chatty, idly reminiscent book of ours—and now it is under the great shadow of war, of death and suffering, that we see it pass into its final shape!

The “little paradise on the hill,” with all its innocent pleasures, its everyday joys and cares; with the antics of the “little furry things at play,” the sayings and doings of the “famiglia”; the roses, the bulbs and seedlings; our alluring garden plans, our small despairs and unexpected blisses—our earthly paradise, as we have said, seems like an unreal place. We wander through it with spirit ill at ease; oppressed, as by a curse, through no fault of ours. The sight of an Autumn Catalogue (hitherto so tempting, so full of promised joys) evokes only a sigh. The offer, from the familiar Dutchman, of bulbs which “it will help Belgium if we buy,” turns the heart sick. We know we must not buy bulbs, this year, because we shall have to buy bread—bread for those who will surely lack it—and yet, if we do not buy, others in their turn must needs go wanting. And here is but the merest drop in the monstrous tide of evils wantonly let loose upon humanity by the self-styled Attila! There are times when, looking out upon our place of peace, we feel as though, surely, we must all be lost in some fantastic nightmare. It is a September full of golden sunshine; as this night falls, a benign, placid moon rises over the silent moors into a sky the colour of spun-glass. The breeze choirs softly through the boughs of scented Larch and Birch. All is beauty, harmony—while in those fields yonder, south of the sea, the Huns.... Pray God, by the time the Spring begins to stir shyly once more in our copses; what time the Crocus pushes forth its little tender flame, and the Snowdrop (with us fugitive and reluctant) bends its timorous head under our hill-top winds, we may indeed look back upon these days as upon some dreadful dream!

Meanwhile—even as the Villino itself is now to become a home of convalescence for some of our wounded, still unknown, but to be welcomed soon; even as the Cottage is to be a refuge for women and babes fled from burning Belgian hamlets—the following pages, breathing content and all the harmless ways of life, may perchance help to beguile thoughts surfeited with tales and pictures of mortal strife. We hope that, as a sprig of Lavender, or a Cowslip, by his pillow might for a moment relieve the blood-tinted vision of a stricken soldier, so, perhaps, some unquiet heart labouring under the strain of long-drawn suspense, will find a passing relaxation, a forgotten smile, in the company of Loki and his companions.

Sept. 1914

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

IN COLOUR

[THE HEMICYCLE]Frontispiece
[THE DUTCH GARDEN]To face page16
[THE BEECH]””142
[SUMMER]””150
[THE MOOR]””208
[AUTUMN]””234
[THE HOLLY TREE]””272
[WINTER]””292

OUR SENTIMENTAL

GARDEN

I

It is easier to begin with our beasts.—First, they are much the most important, and secondly, there are only six of them. Our bulbs lie in their thousands with just a green nose showing here and there now in January and are nameless things: only collectively dear, if extraordinarily so.

It will instantly be perceived what kind of gardeners we are, and what kind of garden we keep. We have scarcely a single plant of “individuality.” We do not spend ten guineas on a jonquil bulb, nor fifteen on a peony. To our mind no flower can be common: therefore we lavish our resources on quantity. I was going to say: not quality, but that is where, in our opinion, the modern kind of garden-maker goes wrong. What is in a name? Where flowers are concerned, nothing! But how much, what treasures of joy and colour, of shade and exquisite texture, of general blessedness in fact, lurk in the beloved crowd of the nameless things, that come to us designated only thus: “Best mixed Darwin Tulips”; “Blue bedding Hyacinths”; “Single Jonquils, best mixed,” and so on! We once descended so far as to order “a hundred mixed Delphiniums at 10s.,” and when, last June, we looked down on a certain bed in the Reserve Garden from the seat under The Beech Tree ‹which commands that enthralling spot› and saw the blue battalion glowing with enamel colours draw up against the moor beyond, we felt not at all ashamed of ourselves—yea, we felt conceitedly pleased.

But our beasts are individual indeed; and, as it was said, there are only six of them.

CONCERNING THE PEKINESE

The first in order of importance is the Pekinese, who, purchased at a moment when we were much under the enchantment of the “Ring,” we ineptly—yet, from the ethnological standpoint, not altogether inappropriately—called Loki: his coat is fiery red, and he is an adept at deceit. When we want to impress strangers we hastily explain that he is Mo-Loki, son of the great Mo-Choki, the celebrated champion. Loki ‹who frequently assures us that he was a Lion, in Pekin› was born on the roof of the Imperial Palace in High Street, Kensington. His appearance and behaviour are such as bear testimony to his princely lineage. We let him run a great deal when he was a puppy, with the result that his legs are a little longer than is usual with members of the Imperial Dynasty, but “Grandpa”—Stop! It is as well to explain from the outset that, since the advent of Loki in the family, Grandpa is the name that has devolved, automatically, upon the Master of the House: the infant Loki’s mistress having assumed, from the very necessity of things, the post and responsibility of mother ‹in Pekinese ma-ma›, it must follow as the night the day that her father “illico” became Grandpa.—To resume: though his legs are a trifle longer than is usual, the Master of the House says he is much more beautiful by reason of this distinction. And we all agree with him.

Loki will not believe that the Manchu masters have fallen in China ‹of course it is not from us that he has heard these distressing rumours›, so he still demands as his right the best silk eiderdowns to lie upon, satin for his cushions, grilled kidney for his breakfast, freshly poured water in his bowl every time he wants to drink; and expects immediate attention at lunch and dinner-time, play-time, “bye-bye” time, and all the other times when he thinks he would like his chest rubbed. He sits up and waves his paws with imperious gesture; or else rolls over on his back and puts them together in an attitude of prayer. He had not at first much oriental calm about him. Indeed, when he first came to us his one desire was to play with every living thing he saw, from a cow to a chicken; but the cow misunderstood and ran at him, and the chicken misunderstood and ran away. The poor puppy was perplexed and wounded. He always believed every new Teddy bear toy to be alive at first, and would receive it in a rapture of tail-wagging and nuzzling kisses, until what time, it dawning upon him that Teddy was a senseless fraud, he set himself to shake and worry it like a little fury. Now he is older and wiser. He pretends not to see cows, and condemns chickens; he will growl at a strange dog, and bite and shake a new toy the very first day. Thus, alas, do years make a cynic of the young idealist!

LOKI’S OWN ANIMALS

He only plays with his own animals. These are: Susan, the Butler’s dog, and Arabella, the Lavroch setter, a long, lovely, lithe, foolish creature, whose surname is Stewart, having come to Villino Loki out of far Scotland from a distinguished member of that Royal clan. Arabella, who is ten times the size of Loki, turns him over and over, tramples on him, nibbles and licks him till he is unspeakable. He will leap at her nose, hang on to one of her long flapping ears, race up and down the slopes and round and round the green terraces, till they both collapse, and their tongues hang out of their laughing mouths, seeming to flicker with their panting breath, and become as long as the tongues of dragons on old manuscripts.

A matter to be noticed is that they never play in their walks with us across the moors—apparently that is against dog etiquette—but they will lie in wait for each other at the garden gate on the way home, and the fun and the pouncing and growling jocosities begin the instant they are inside.

Susan doesn’t play with the other animals, though she exercises an irresistible fascination upon every dog that comes within a mile of her. She has a kind of Jane Eyre charm, we suppose, for it is not at first visible to the naked eye. She always does remind us of a small elderly German governess, for she is squat, undemonstrative, and eminently—oh, eminently!—respectable. She is a fox-terrier. She has, however, one terrible weakness. Her only joy is to have stones thrown for her. She is not, therefore, an agreeable person to take out for a walk, for she will get right under your feet, dig up a stone, point at it, and bark, “Throw, throw!” with a shrill persistence that goes through your head. And if you are weak-minded enough to yield, then indeed you are undone. You will be kept throwing till you wish her in the Dog Star. She will scratch up stones till her paws are raw. This we think a great defect, but Loki sees no flaw in her.

CELLARERS YOUNG, CELLARERS OLD

When Susan’s Butler first came to us, we had suffered acutely from butlers young and butlers old, butlers bashful and butlers bold—all of whom drank steadily. One nearly murdered his Buttons. Another, engaged by correspondence, vouched for by the agency, announcing his years as forty-five, arrived huge, decrepit, asthmatic; almost, if not quite, qualified for an old-age pension. The eight o’clock dinner he found it impossible to serve before nine; and then that ceremony became a perfect torture of dazed crawling, enlivened by stertorous breathing, for which asthma and chronic alcoholism disputed responsibility. When the Master of the House, who is very tender-hearted, intimated that he thought that, for the good of the newcomer’s health, they had better part with the utmost celerity, the veteran assented resignedly with the husky gasp peculiar to him.

“You know,” said the Master of the House, mildly, “you are not quite what you represented yourself to be. You said you were forty-five!”

“I think,” wheezed the Ancient Cellarer; “I think I said forty-seven, sir.”

“Oh, forty-seven!” The Master of the House was a little satiric. “Even if you had said forty-seven, you are a great, great deal more than that!”

“Sir,” said the delinquent, with a beery twinkle, “no butler can ever be more than forty-seven.”

This, we understand, is a maxim of life in the profession.

A third—he was young and beautiful—had a fondness for a brew called gin-and-ginger, which had so cheering and immediate effect upon him that, having left the drawing-room after tea the very pink and perfection of propriety, he would announce dinner in an advanced condition of jocular elevation, and when the plates slid out of his hands he would survey them with a waggish smile, as one who would say: “Bless their little hearts, see how playful they are!” We became anxious to secure a servant who would have more than a few streaks of sobriety, and when Susan’s owner came, we felt we had secured that pearl. He came in a great hurry ‹without Susan› because of the equally hurried departure of the beautiful hilarious one. After a week or so, we asked him if he would consider us as a permanency. He said he would have to consider us a little longer. After another ten days he informed us of Susan’s existence, and announced his intention of going to fetch her. We breathed again.

IN THE MATTER OF O’REILLY

Juvenal—that is his name—is very fond of animals. A little too fond, we thought, when he invited a military friend’s dog to stay, during the owner’s absence at manœuvres. This animal, by name O’Reilly, arrived in dilapidated, devil-may-care, barrack-yard condition, which was a great shock to our Manchu prince. He also had pink bald elbows and knees. His hind legs were longer than his front ones, which gave him an ourang-outang gait. As became his Milesian name, he fought every one he met on his walks. Why he did not fight Loki, we do not know, for Loki loathed him and, we believe, suffered acutely in his poor little Chinese soul all during his stay. Yet unwelcome as he was, scald, ungainly, tiresome, there was something pathetic about the creature. He had a way of looking at one, deprecating and pleading at once; and he would display such rapture at the smallest token of toleration, that, despite our satisfaction at his departure, we had an ache in our hearts too. We have a shrewd suspicion that the corporal-major who owned him was a rough customer, and that poor O’Reilly’s life was not that happy one which every “owned” dog’s ought to be. A dog should not be treated as a dog.

As for cats, once they have passed the giddy days of youth, in which they are imps, sprites, goblins, pucks, furry, fairy, freakish things—anything but mere animals—one cannot help feeling a certain awe with regard to them. Despite the many cycles of years that have elapsed since their ancestors took habitation with us, they have remained true Easterns. From father to son, from mother to daughter they have handed down secret stores of occult knowledge which they keep jealously to themselves, a sacred inheritance of race. Those eyes that fix you with pupil contracted to a slit, and look through and beyond you into mysteries undreamt of by you: that lofty detachment, that ineradicable independence, that relentless indifference: have we not all felt by these signs and tokens how completely the cat puts us outside the sphere of his real thoughts and feelings? Priests or priestesses they seem to be, of some alien creed, soul satisfying, contemplative, with sudden savage rites. Have you ever watched a cat with regard turned inwards, meditating? Its body sways, but the spirit bubbles softly as if it were seething in content over a mystic fire. It does not want you to join it in its rapture, like your dog. It has no desire to admit you into its comradeship. It is as self-contained and self-absorbed as the highest grade Mahatma.

KITTY-WEE THE LOVELY

Kitty-Wee, the Lovely, is chief of our three cats. She is a Persian lady with a wonderful robe of silver grey, faintly blue, and orange eyes inherited from that most beautiful, most evil monster, Tittums the Bold-and-Bad, her father, who spent his adorable kittenhood and his stormy youth under our London roof, until his habit of lying in wait for the servants at odd corners and jumping at their elbows, made it imperative for us to part with him. He was then adopted by a gentle parson’s daughter, in the freedom of whose country dwelling it was hoped that he might sow his wild oats and settle down into respectability. But alas! the day dawned, when lying on the rector’s cassock in the dining-room, he was so incensed at the reverend gentleman’s polite request to move, that he chased him round and round the room, ran him down in the hall and bit him. The churchman was not an unreasonable being and had made many allowances for the frailty of degenerate creation; but he drew the line at the violation of his reverend elbows. Tittums was once again, with many tears and heart-rendings, passed on. This time to a lady who keeps a cattery. We hear that he has become a model of every virtue, and that she only wears a fencing mask and boxing gloves when she combs him, because on the day when she left them off, Tittums, in a fit of absence of mind, bit her through the thumb. Anyone who takes a cat paper can hear more of this most distinguished beast, under the name of “Saracinesca.”

Kitty-Wee is supposed to have inherited her father’s superlative looks—only he was “smoke”—and her mother’s angelic disposition. If occasionally a spark of the paternal temper flashes out, the gardener’s wife ‹with whom she prefers to dwell› says “Kitty is a bit nervous to-day.”

KITTY-WEE’S MESALLIANCES

It was after Kitty-Wee’s first mésalliance that she took up her abode with the worthy pair in the “little cot,” as Mrs. Adam calls it, at the bottom of the garden. Persian princesses, from the time of “A Thousand and One Nights” onwards, are proverbially capricious. But what perverse freak of youthful fancy induced our delicate silver-pawed highborn damsel to fix her young affections upon Mr. Hopkinson was and is, a painful mystery.

Mr. Hopkinson, a very hooligan among cats, so degenerate indeed as to have lost all his eastern characteristics, and to have assumed a positively “Arry-like, bank-’oliday, disreputable, Hampstead-Heath kind of vulgarity,” was a lean, mangy creature with a denuded tail. He had a black spot over one eye; the other eye was conspicuous by its absence. We could hear his raucous voice uplifted in serenade, suggestive of accordeons, night after night, and his guttural whisper of “Me ’Oighness” behind the bushes when we went on our walks. Every effort was made to discourage the preposterous suitor. But, alas! Kitty smiled. The infatuated Princess escaped the vigilance of her distracted family. Perhaps it is best to draw a veil over the consequences of this rash alliance. Kitty indeed did her best to obliterate them, refusing to do anything but sit heavily on three black and white kittens with ropy tails. She only purred again the day the last one died; “Oh! she was pleased, Mam,” said the gardener’s wife; “quite took up again, she did.”

Kitty-Wee’s next matrimonial venture, though likewise, we grieve to say, morganatic, was very much more successful. In fact it is to it that we owe—Bunny! The name, the lineage, the very personality of Bunny’s father is wrapt in mystery; but judging by the splendour of Bunny’s black fur, it is to be conjectured that Kitty-Wee’s choice was of a dark complexion, and if not royal, at any rate of noble blood.

Two brave brothers Bunny had, but he is the sole survivor; all the more cherished. And really, even if he lacks his mother’s supreme distinction, we cannot but feel proud of him. Waggish, gentle, humorous creature that he is, he will hang round the neck of Adam, the gardener, like a boa, for a whole morning together; or stalk the dogs from tree to tree, pounce on them at unexpected moments to deliver a swinging friendly slap on Susan’s fat back, or to waltz with Arabella, or to inveigle Loki, with odd freakish sidelong gambols, into a mysterious game of his own, which, as our little Chinaman has something of the cat in him, he seems to understand.

We are very glad that Adam had Bunny to console him, for Kitty-Wee’s offspring has an odd resemblance in size and appearance to Cæsar, the late Garden Cat, much beloved, who alas! went the way of all fur ‹with a melancholy little assistance from the chemist› shortly before Bunny’s appearance in this plane.

“Oh, Miss,” said Mrs. Adam, on the Sunday that followed that Socratic tragedy, “last night was the most dreadful night we ever spent! It was the first time for thirteen years we hadn’t had a cat in the house! Oh! Miss, I thought Daddy would have broken his heart. He just sat with his head on his hand, and sighed. Really Miss Marie, I don’t know when we’ve felt so bad.”

It will be seen that Mr. and Mrs. Adam have the right feeling towards “little sister cat and little brother dog,” as St. Francis of Assisi would have called them. This suits us very well, and oddly enough, Villino Loki is a kind of paradise for things of fur and feather. Cat and dog live in a strange harmony. To see Loki kiss Bunny, or Bunny clasp Arabella round the neck, is as pleasing a sight as you could imagine. And if Kitty-Wee occasionally boxes Loki with a kind of delicate compactness, it is with her claws in. As for Juvenal, the butler, whose pantry is full of singing birds, no sense of etiquette will restrain him from public blandishments when Loki is on the scene. George, the footman, can be heard addressing him—Loki—in back passages, as “My loved one!” And Tom, the old long-haired English cat, rules the kitchen.

THE VICISSITUDES OF TOM

Tom has reached the patriarchal age of eighteen years, and is cherished by the master of the Villino. He has had many vicissitudes. He was stung by an adder during our very first summer, years ago, on these moors, and lay for a day in a coma with one paw swollen the size of a child’s arm, to be saved by doses of brandy and milk. A few years later he was caught in a trap. How he got free no one knows, but we found him crawling, piteously complaining, with a shattered leg. With the help of the cook, who followed the tradition of the establishment and was Tom’s slave, the leg was set with strips of firewood, the bone being very successfully mended. It so happened that the Master of the House had, about the same time, snapped his tendo-plantaris at tennis; and it was a sight to see them both when they stumped down the wooden passages—the master dot-and-go-one on his crutches, Thomas following in his splints, dot-and-go-three.

Tom

The amateur surgery, however, was not completely successful. Though Thomas’ bone knit, the poor mangled flesh remained unhealed, and at last the cook conveyed her darling in a basket to the most celebrated London animal doctor. Thereafter ensued a time of horrible suspense. Telegrams went briskly backwards and forwards. Dr. Jewell “doubted if he could save the limb.” Tom’s adoring family could not contemplate the tragedy therein implied. “Better euthanasia!” we wired. “Will do my best for little cat,” the sympathetic Æsculapius of God’s humble creatures replied. Hope and devotion triumphed. Tommy returned to us with three legs in large fur trousers, the fourth as close as a mouse. The fur thereon has never grown to full length again. We fear it will never grow now.

Dear old Tom is toothless, and he is getting a little bald on the top of his head; but he is a beautiful creature still, and a dandy. His four spats are always of an almost startling snowiness; his shirt-front ditto. He is not very fond of any of the other animals, and was so revolted by Kitty-Wee’s mésalliance that she could not show her face in the kitchen without his instantly using as severe language as ever John Knox to Queen Mary. “Hussy!” was the mildest of his terms.

THE DUTCH GARDEN

II

Where we live, high on the southern moorlands of Surrey, the desolation of winter never seems to reach us; unless, indeed, upon certain days of streaming rains, or weeping mists that rush rapid and ghost-like up the valley, and blot out the world from view. But those days would be dreary anywhere and in any season.

Our funny little house, more like an Italian “Villino,” perhaps, than anything English, stands high, midway between the rolling shoulders of moor and the green-wooded dip of the valley. And the moor has always colour in it. There are some sunset days when it seems not so much to reflect as to give out rose and purple and carmine. And now in January it is a wonderful copper-brown, with the tawny of dying Bracken and the yellow of young Gorse. And opposite to us a belt of birchwood is purple against solemn green of pine. And the purple and solemn green run right down together to the bright verdure of fields and dells; then up again to moorland, where the fir trees march up once more against the sky.

There are Larches in these woods, and Oaks, so that the spring tints are almost as wonderful as the autumn. When the Furze and Broom are all guinea-gold on the moor, the young Bracken begins to creep in green patches that are pure joy. Later on the Bell-heather breaks into a deep rose which, with the sun on it, holds such a glory of colour that you could scarce find its match in an old Cathedral window. And when this splendour begins to turn to russet, then comes the tender silvery amethyst of the Ling, and spreads a mantle all over those great shoulders of wild land that is of the exact hue most beautiful to contrast with the full summer woods and the blue of an August sky; a combination so matchless for colour-loving eyes that it seems as if one’s soul were not big enough to hold the complete impression. And when our Delphiniums rear themselves against this background, we feel, looking on it all, as if we could sing for the mere rapture of it; or—having no voice—roll in the grass like Loki or like Bunny.

A LITTLE PLACE OF ONE’S OWN

For a long time we—Loki’s Grandfather and Grandmother—had said to each other that we must have a week-end cottage. We were so tired of hiring other people’s houses, summer after summer, and of the labour ‹not unattended by some pleasurable excitement on Loki’s Grandmother’s part› of pulling their furniture about, and hiding away all the family portraits and the choicest works of art, to make the alien spaces tolerable to one’s own individuality. So tired, too, of the boredom and worry of having to restore everything to its pristine ugliness and hang up the enlarged photographs and the dreadful oil paintings on the walls once more—a tedious task, albeit enlivened on one occasion by the thrilling discovery that, having consigned these treasures to an oak chest in the hall, most of them had grown fur; and that on another the oil painting of your detested landlady, in middle Victorian chignon and the hump of the period, has received a scratch on the nose which no copious application of linseed oil will disguise. We always detest our landlady ... though not as much as we loathe the tenants who may happen to hire a house of ours.

At the end of each summer, therefore, we would make elaborate calculations to prove what a great economy it would be to have a little place of our own. Finally these plans and desires crystallized into action. When Loki’s Grandfather returned from a round of inspection to the hotel where we were staying in the district we fancied, and told Loki’s Grandmother that he had visited a funny little house with a terrace upon which he “saw her”—in his own phraseology—she was extremely sceptical. And when we drove down the hill to view his discovery, and were literally dropped from the side road through a perfunctory gate into the steepest little courtyard it is possible to imagine, and she beheld green stains on the rough-cast wall of the white small house, her scepticism increased to scoffing point. She was blind to the charms of the pretty pillared porch. The narrowness of the entrance passage filled her with disdain. Though she grudgingly admitted a possibility in the drawing-room, it was not until we emerged upon the terrace that her preventions vanished.—That rise and fall of moorland in such startling proximity, and the way in which the house and its terraces seemed to cling to the hillside and be perched in space between the giant curves and the dip of the valley beyond, fairly took her breath away. An artist friend described the first impression of the view in these words: “It is so sudden!” For a long time, even after the queer, fascinating spot had become our own, this wonder of “suddenness” always seized us.

It still seems incomprehensible to us that anyone could have desired to dispossess himself of so attractive a place—an Italian “Villino” on the Surrey Highlands is not to be found every day.

But, after all, it only became a Villino after our ownership. It was just a small white house on the hillside before that. Heather and Gorse, Bramble and Bracken pressed hard upon the small area of the property which was at all cultivated, between densely growing clumps of pine and holly.

THE FIRST TRANSFORMATIONS

The courtyard is no longer dank: it is widened, levelled, and walled in against its high fir-grown strip of bank. It is guarded by bright green wooden gates, and three sentinel Cypresses that begin to mark the Italian note.

As for the lower reach—the Reserve Garden now—which in former days was a dumping-ground for horrors of broken glass, potsherds and tin cans ‹a dreary patch of weeds and couch grass withal›, it is unrecognizable. Especially this year, when, to the herbaceous border, to the espaliered apple-trees, and to the neat little turfed walks, we have added a Rose-Garden between screens of rustic woodwork which are to blaze in the full luxuriance of the adorable Wichuriana tribe.

Where the jungle waxed thickest, fair paths have been cleared. An avenue bordered by a double row of tall slender Pines runs from top to bottom of the hill, with a view of our neighbour’s buttercup field on the one hand, and of our own Bluebell and May-tree glade on the other. It requires a positive effort of imagination to recall that this was a literally impenetrable thicket when we first came.

A VILLINO ON SURREY HILLS

Nor is the house less altered. As it was hinted before, a small white Surrey house has, by some singular, scarcely intentional process, become enchanted into an Italian Villino. Of course, some structural alterations were necessary.

On entering the red-tiled hall ‹once the pantry!›, at the end of which the glass door giving on the terrace frames Verrochio’s little naked boy, struggling with his big fish, flanked on each side by Cypresses, you might easily fancy yourself at Fiesole or Bello Sguardo, but for the unmistakable northern stamp of the moorland beyond. Passing through the other glass doors into the inner hall, the first object to meet the eye is the big della Robbia over the gracious figure of the Madonna kneeling against a blue sky with dear little green clouds upon it. Through the open dining-room door you have a vision, all golden orange, of different deep shades. The Scotch builder we employed for the construction of the two new wings opined that “the scheme was verra’ daring.” Personally, every time we go in, it warms the cockles of our hearts. We had the golden-hued carpet especially dyed. We chose the tangerine distemper for the walls. We had, indeed, considerable difficulty in obtaining the higher note for the curtains. Antique chairs, with seats and backs of brown leather tooled like old bindings, we brought from Rome; from whence also came the yellow marble sideboard table on its gilt-carved legs, above which a bronzed cast of Gian di Bologna’s Mercury springs out from that orange wall on a flamboyant gilt bracket, with a grace we have never seen that adorable conception display anywhere else. We found a handsome, but anæmic, oak fitment in this room, filling the whole right wall with cupboards, panelled overmantel, and bookshelves. It is no longer anæmic, but polished by our industry to a pleasing depth of amber gloss.

THE DORATORE’S ANTIQUES

So Italy walked into the little white Surrey house almost as soon as the doors were open to us. But it is in the drawing-room that she has mostly established her self. It is so filled with dear Roman things that we can think ourselves back again in that haunt of all joy, when we cross its threshold. It is full of associations of delightful days, of quaint beings. There is the rococo paravent, gilt and carved in most delicate extravagance, which we bought of the doratore in the Piazza Nicosia. That fire-screen—a real Bernini, once the frame of an altar-piece—now holds in its strong bold oval a pane of glass where perhaps some wan Madonna shewed her seven-pierced heart. The doratore picked up these things in old villas and disused churches. His booth was indeed a sight to see.—Having recently been on a visit to Rome, Loki’s “great-aunt” was naturally charged with many commissions in that quarter. Armed with a letter of directions from the Italian scholar of the family, she and a Lancashire maid wandered down there one misty afternoon in November, at an hour when all the crazy little houses of the ancient Piazza seem to fold up and huddle together in the purple Roman dusk.

The doratore’s wares winked through the dimness; and having duly knocked their heads against wreaths of dangling frames in his doorway, the pilgrims proceeded to steer a perilous path among the heaps of gilded débris within.

The doratore, made visible only by his paper cap, was seated in a nest of angels, tinkering at a fat cherub and whistling gaily. Hearing steps he poked his head through the large oval of an empty mirror, and stared unconcernedly at the visitors, whose advance was punctuated by cataclysms of falling frames, church candlesticks, and other “oggetti religiosi.”

At the fifth or sixth tumble, he rolled away from his angels with unimpaired cheerfulness, and apologized.

“Scusi, scusi!” Smilingly he picked up a broken wing and a bit of acanthus leaf. “Scusi!” again. “Aha! a letter!”

Here the fat laugh merged into a bellow which made the walls ring, and brought a dirty little urchin tumbling down a ladder from some loft overhead. The urchin diving under a heap of prostrate apostles, produced a stick with an iron spike, which he held respectfully under his patron’s chin. The doratore stuck a candle on the spike, lit it, and with the flame in fearful proximity to his bearded face, proceeded to open the letter.

“Aha! from the noble family at Villino Loki!” Here he took off his cap with a flourish and did not replace it. “The signor Inglese, is he well?—Mi piace. And the gentilissima signorina who does me the honour to write?—Mi piace, mi piace. And Mama?—Better?—Bonissimo! Please the good God to bring her again to Rome. But not this month,” waving a warning finger before his nose. “In April. In the primavera, Rome is as salubrious as she is beautiful. Now what does Mama want? Brackets? Angels?—Ecco.”

He pointed to a pair of fantastic creatures that jutted out like gargoyles under the ceiling. “What? Not pretty? Ma! Scusi! they are antichi bellissimi—they come from a castle in the Abruzzi; there is not their match in Rome.” Snapping the candle from the imp, on whose locks it was unheededly guttering, he waved it round his own head, waking up unexpected companies of saints on the walls and making pools of light and darkness among the golden hillocks.

“They are exactly the noble family’s taste,” said the doratore, replacing his cap with an air of finality. “She said cinquanta lire—she shall have them for quaranta!”

Recognizing that this incident was closed, Loki’s aunt thought she would do a deal on her own account, and picking up a little antique frame, fell back on the only Italian word she knew:

“Quanto?”

The doratore unexpectedly priced the frame at twenty-five lire, and cheap at that, and all of a sudden the little shop was filled with confusion. The would-be purchaser wished to take away her prize, the doratore, misunderstanding, vociferated that nothing would be broken on the sea-journey; the Lancashire maid struck in with English addresses for the other wares; finally, the candle-bearer was sent flying round the corner to fetch a friend who, by the grace of God, had the gift of tongues.

Breathless, he returned, with a bundle of rags hobbling along on a crutch, by his side.

“Benissimo!” exclaimed the doratore, with a sigh of relief. “This gentleman, signora, is a friend of all the artists in Rome! He knows English, French, German—everything!”

He then performed the ceremonious rites of introduction! “Signor Guiseppi Renzo, a person of great worth and learning.—The noble lady belonging to the family of my cherished patrons, i Castelli.”

The bundle of rags swept off its battered hat with a flourish, disclosing a wall-eye and a three-weeks-old beard, and remarked, in Italian, that the weather was beautiful for the time of the year.

“But not so beautiful as in spring,” said the doratore encouragingly. Upon which Loki’s aunt bowed too, and smiled and murmured, “Oh! si, si—I mean no.” And then feeling dreadfully uncouth and ill-mannered in presence of so much courtesy, picked up her frame again and looked helpless. Instantly the interpreter warmed to his office. In fluent if curious English, he ascertained her wishes, and then communicated them with much gesticulation to the doratore, who slapped a fat forehead, exclaiming in a contrite manner, “Va bene, va bene!” Finally, the imp was dispatched on a last errand in search of a little open carriage, and having carefully wrapped the frame in a copy of the “Corriere” produced from his own pocket, the bundle of rags hobbled out into the Piazza, where he and the doratore stood bareheaded to wish the ladies a safe journey to England, and a speedy return to Rome.

MORE BRIC-A-BRAC

It is little wonder that the doratore should cherish us. The drawing-room of the Villino on the Surrey hill is chiefly furnished out of his store. Therefrom come the Venetian chairs, the huge Goldoni armchair, the two cabinets of rusty gold. The hanging cabinet is full of Venetian glass, picked up—of all places—at that roaring cheap emporium, Finocchi’s, in the hideous modern corso fitly dedicated to Vittorio Emanuele. ‹To think these bubbles of ethereal loveliness, these liquid curves, these foam-frail phantasies, should have been discovered, unshattered, in such a spot!› There from the walls a wistful Giovannino, with pious, sentimental, guileless head inclined, looks down from his golden background, a true bit of early Siennese simplicity and faith. He came to us from the talons of a voluble Jew in the Via due Macelli, from which unclean grasp were likewise rescued those meek companions, “St. Bernardino of Siena” and “St. Antoninus,” on the opposite wall. St. Bernardino’s face is quite out of drawing, but, nevertheless, rarely has any presentment been more impregnated with holy benignity. The gentle pair hang just above a statue of Polyhymnia.... Oh! that “Manifattura di Signa,” in the dark purlieus of the Via Babuino! It is a blessing that we only discovered it the last week of our four months’ stay in Rome, and that our resources were then at a low ebb; else, indeed, the exiguous limits of our new country home never would have held our purchases. Another “Madonna” between the rose-coloured curtains in the narrow window.

Yes, indeed, there are a great many “Madonnas” about the place. There is an undeniably papistical atmosphere.—An old gentleman, of developed intellectuality, who stumbled in upon us shortly after our establishment, could not conceal the horrible impression it made upon him. His thoughts would have been easy to read even if the hurry of his adieux had not so plainly proclaimed his disgust. Seeing his eyes fixed upon the majolica statuette in question, we ‹perhaps with a little malice› informed him that it was known as the “Madonna del Bacio.” It was then he rose, not quite swallowing down his “Faugh!”

AN OLD-TIME NOTE

“You had not expected to find such superstition abroad in an enlightened age,” we murmured politely. We cling to these old-world symbols—some of us by conviction, others for mere love of the beautiful past.—A little mistake? The wrong house, say you? How could we have been so stupid as not to guess!—Of course, you wanted the bungalow at the other end of the village. Yes, Mrs. Ludwigsohn is everything that you can desire to meet. Up-to-date cap-a-pie. Socialism, rationalism, suffragism. You can begin on the suffrage: she will saw the air with her right hand in a convincing platform manner. A delightful, capable woman! She feeds her infants scientifically on proteids. And there are Röntgen pictures—anatomical, you know—in the hall, that you will find more inspiring than della Robbia. Oh, you will get on with her splendidly. We know her ... slightly. Indeed, we blush when we think of our one and only meeting: it was so inharmonious on our part. She began to argue—and instantly had us in a cleft stick: “Soul?” she exclaimed, fiercely interrupting an incautious remark. “Soul? there is no such thing. I deny it.—Prove,” she cried, “prove I have a soul!”

Poor lady, how could we? No—the Villino is certainly no place for the higher critic; for the lady of ’isms. We are not rationalistic in our tastes; we love old and simple things; prefer to take much for granted in life and enjoy the good peace that is vouchsafed.

III

SIX GARDENING VIRTUES

When we first began to own a garden we could not bring ourselves to wait in patience for developments. We expected our beds to bloom as by magic. We vehemently ordered pot-plants because no seedlings could be expected to “do anything” in June; and the disproportion between our bills and the result filled us with dismay. But a garden is at once the most delightful and cunning of teachers. How kindly are the virtues it inculcates!—Patience, faith, hope, tenderness, gratitude, resignation, things in themselves as fragrant and beautiful as the flowers, or like the herbs, a little repellent of aspect, but sweet in their bruised savour.

Now we have even been taught to take pleasure and comfort from the vision of the beds in their winter preparation, where with the believer’s eye, we anticipate the fulfilment of the spring. In the little Dutch Garden under the new wing, the two long beds between the clipped Bilberry hedges are full of compact cushions of Forget-me-not. Through these the green noses of the china-blue Hyacinths, that are to make lakes of colour and scent at the end of March, are beginning to push upwards.

The winter has been very mild.—Another garden lesson: too much spoiling in infancy is bound to produce forwardness in the young, and the inevitable result of withering snubs!

When the Hyacinths have faded, the Forget-me-nots will have spread a sheet of tender beauty over the unsightliness. ‹Did we mention that a garden teaches charity?› And between this flying scud of blue foam the Darwin Tulips will have already reared bold green snake heads which will gradually become invaded by tints of mauve, rose, dark purple, until the day when their glorious chalices will open, as if cut out of living jewels, translucent to the light.

DUTCH BULBS AND ROSES

The Dutch Garden is bounded by a clipped yew hedge on two sides, divided by a rustic archway where Pink Dorothy rambles in June and onwards. Against this hedge there are two long beds lying to the south, filled with crimson and red roses: in spring edged with Darwins and Arabis, before Mme. Normand Levavasseur spreads her disappointing maroon clusters. On the north side the brick wall of the terrace, divided in its turn opposite the archway by brick steps, is flanked by Darwin tulip beds. The beds under the side of the house to the west have also Darwins with a carpet of Forget-me-nots and a fringe of Arabis. The space that runs back to the outer wall under the study windows is planted with Gloire de Versailles, Pyrus Japonica and the ubiquitous Tulips and Forget-me-nots.

There is one thing we have succeeded in impressing on the patient and kindly Adam, and that is that we “cannot bear bald spaces.” Our bulbs lie as close as they can without injuring each other. Our Wallflowers, even now, in January, jostle!

In the bed that runs right along the bricked upper terrace, there lie, awaiting the call of the different months ‹please add docility and punctuality to the moral list›, behind a deep border of Mrs. Sinkins, a double row of Crocuses, a row of Thomas More Tulips, a little hedge of white and red “Polyantha” Roses, and groups of “Candidum” Lilies. At intervals, on the top of the terrace wall, are large Compton vases which will foam with Forget-me-Nots, and thrust clusters of Hyacinths up against the Moor by and by. Just now they carry little yellow torches of Retinospora Aurea, which Adam said, when he first planted them, looked, he thought, “very lonely,” but which, each rising from a field of green moss, stand out, we think, with a classic dignity against the sombre magnificence of those rolling winter hills.

IV

And did we say that one could ever in any circumstances wish Susan into the dogstar? Alas! poor dear little Susan, she reposes in a raw, ostentatious grave in the Oak Tree Glade with six bulb spikes at the top of the mound. We should like to put a granite stone there with the words: “Here lies Susan, a good dog.” All that was possible was done to save her, and she was the most pathetic, gentle, patient creature; at the very end, seeking blindly with one small paw for her master.

FORBIDDEN TERRITORY

Poor Juvenal was so disconsolate that we did not know what to do. We hit, however, on the happy thought of purchasing a small white Highland Terrier puppy from a litter on sale in the neighbourhood. Bettine ‹thus she has been christened with a fine disregard of local colour› arrived, a dirty, cringing, abject little wretch; but the atmosphere of Villino Loki has wrought so great a change that she is now a perfect imp of mischief and general cheekiness. The Master of the House says she is like a Paris gamin, and that Gavroche is the only name that befits her. The days of cringing are certainly over. Her long ears cocked, her wide mouth derisively open, she defies authority, with attitudes and expressions that can only be transcribed by such remarks as “Pip, Pip,” or the gesture which the French know as Pied-de-nez.

The other dogs at first protested fiercely against this substitute for their beloved Susan even Arabella curling a ferocious lip, and striking out with her fringed paw. But now they have accepted the new comrade with all the generosity of their fine characters. Loki himself makes no objection, except when she ventures upon territory which he regards as peculiarly his own; such as the grand-maternal bedroom.

The month that has taken away the harmless humble life of Juvenal’s fox-terrier, has also brought the news of England’s loss in one of her most gallant sons. He was a friend of the household, and Loki, I am sure, does not forget—for a long memory is one of the Pekinese characteristics—how the South Pole hero played hide-and-seek with him in his puppyhood for a whole hour, one summer’s day, like a very child himself. The family of Villino Loki have memories, too, of that friendship which they valued so highly; and they will always carry the vivid picture of the strong brown face, with the blue eyes that were at once as guileless as a child’s and full of a far-away vision, as if they never ceased to contemplate their high and distant goal. The world is crowded with bumptious people who do nothing at all that is useful, if they do not do harm. Here was a man who had already accomplished mighty achievement and was set on mightier still, and there never was anyone so modest, so anxious to push others forward and keep himself in the background. He was asked by one of us to write a line in an autograph book, and he set down characteristically a tribute to another:

“The friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,

Grapple them to thy soul with hooks of steel....”

We laughed ‹after that futile fashion that becomes a kind of habit nowadays› and said, “We always think that sounds so uncomfortable!”

He raised those blue eyes, half humorously, half deprecatingly. “You make me feel ashamed of being incorrigibly romantic.”

It was we who felt ashamed.

“We are sure,” we answered, “you have a good friend somewhere.”

“Yes,” he said, “the best ever a man had.”

We are glad to think that friendship was with him all through and at the end. In one of the last letters ever received from the doomed Antarctic Expedition the tribute is paid again: “No words of mine,” writes he, “can describe what he is.”

TOM’S GRAND MANNERS

The birds have eaten every single bud on our baby almond trees—the first year that they have had any flower buds at all. Ungrateful little wretches! the Master of the Villino sees personally to the replenishing of the numerous bird-baths and drinking-pans; and Juvenal provides them with cocoa-nuts filled with lard and baskets full of crumbs—aided by Gold-Else, the cook, who loves little creatures in fur and feather as much as the rest of the household. Tom, the old cat, is very happy under this lady’s kind rule, and, to show his appreciation, accompanies her in stately fashion every night up the kitchen stairs to her bedroom door. The act of courtesy accomplished, she as solemnly reconducts him downstairs again to spread his couch for him—a sheet of brown paper, by his request.

The Hyacinths are breaking out of their green hoods, shaking blue bells; but our Scillas seem to be going to disappoint us. This sandy soil on our Surrey heights is not at all appreciated by bulbs. Snowdrops will have nothing to say to us, unless in a prepared bed. Narcissus Poeticus disappeared altogether after one year’s blooming. We are trying to naturalize Bluebells in a glade which we have cleared—and in which this year has been planted an avenue of pink May trees, to end at the bottom of the dell in a group of white Azaleas—but we are not at all sure that we shall succeed. However, we have our compensations: Azaleas thrive, and so do Rhododendrons. We are year by year adding more of the former to the wild slopes.

Below the terrace, yclept the “Hemicycle,” a path bordered with Azalea Mollis was a perfect glory last May, although it had only been planted the preceding autumn. The “Hemicycle” was a little fairy glade of Crocus a week ago, the second in February; and we have still hope of the Scillas which surround our bereft almond trees. A rough wall rises from it to the Upper Terrace, over which Dorothy Rambler will fling its lovely blooms in immense trails by and by; and its stones themselves hold a never-ending succession of delight in the shape of Arabis, Aubretia, Cerastium, Thrift, and the like. Yellow roses climb up to meet the Dorothy, and the dear little pink China Rose grows in bushes all along the front between the Lavender plants which we are trying to acclimatise, but which, year after year, are blighted by the frost before they have had time to grow strong.

Satisfactory as our wall-garden is, there is a wall-garden at a cottage in a neighbouring village which never fails to fill us with envy every time we see it. It belongs to two maiden ladies, whom we have christened Tweedle-Ann and Tweedle-Liza. They are so extraordinarily like each other that even they themselves ‹we have heard› hardly know which is which. They have the same rotundity of figure, the same uncertain obliquity in one eye, the same cheerful rosy visage, the same sleek bands of grey hair.

When the Master of the House was a young man, an Irish servant was heard to observe to him, gazing rapturously at him as he walked away from her vision, all unconsciously, in his shooting-garb: “And indeed he’s a lovely gentleman. Them jars of legs!” ‹As a matter of fact, Loki’s Grandfather has very nice legs.› But Tweedle-Ann and Tweedle-Liza, in short, sensible grey tweed skirts, bending their portly forms over their wall garden, have more than often presented to the passer-by a vision....

The Japanese say that reticence is the very soul of art. Our aspirations are always towards the artistic, but there is something touching in four ... exactly similar ... side by side...!

A TERRIFYING GOOD WISH

To digress once more: Loki’s Grandfather is no doubt a man of fine proportions; though he is not at all plump, he has all the athlete’s dread of becoming so. Once when we were stranded at a small wayside station in Ireland, without even a bench to sit upon, he began to while away the time by testing his weight on the automatic machine. The indicating needle travelled considerably further than he expected! He was standing, transfixed, staring at the pointing finger, when a very old woman with a shawl over her head, holding a very small boy by the hand, suddenly broke into loud paeans beside him:

“God bless your honour!—Isn’t it the grand gentleman you are! Glory be to God, may you grow larger, and larger, and larger!”

“For heaven’s sake,” cried Loki’s Grandfather, wheeling round in horror, “don’t say such a thing!”

“And indeed I do, yer honour.—Look at him now,” she went on, shaking the little creature she held by the hand, “you’ll never see a finer gentleman. Don’t you wish you had a Dada like that?”

Then she burst out again and continued to wish him increase in Sybilline tones. They were both so extraordinarily serious, she in her benisons, he in his terror of the curse, that as Loki’s Grandmother sat on her trunk she was weak with laughter.

A LOCAL POET

The Master of the Villino had a charming little experience last spring. Some time before, in the winter, he fell into conversation with an old sweep, who was tramping up the hill, the evidence of his life-work thick upon him. They discoursed of many things, for the sweep had a wide range of interests. They spoke of the moorland place as it was in bygone days; and of the learned Professor whose eulogies first put it into fashion; of the lectures on Science delivered by this latter; and of the way in which the spring first shows itself in the lower copses while it is still winter on our heights. The sweep knew a dell where the primroses were always a month in advance of any other spot. He had a soul for primroses, unlike Wordsworth’s horrible Peter—which reminds me of the delicious remark made to Loki’s young mistress by an old pensioner in Chelsea Gardens. He led her to the plot he cultivated for himself, with all the childish eagerness of the aged, and pointed to a single yellow crocus, blown this way and that by the wind, for it was a shrewish day. “Look at it, Missie!” he cried. “It’s as playful as a kitten.”

We do not know at what hour in the bleak late February morning the little box was left in the porch. It was found there by the earliest maid, and brought to the Master of the House with his letters in due course; a box that obviously had lately contained carbolic soap. Inside in a nest of moss, carefully covered with red bramble leaves, was a bunch of primroses tied with red wool, and the following “verses”:

“Beneath the moss and the mast,

Though the weather has been wet and cold,

I manage to raise my head

Down in the Sussex wold.”

Thus it began, speaking in the name of the Primrose, to enter, rapidly and boldly into the sweep’s personality:

“To-day I passed by the way,

So I stayed and picked you a few,

To show I do not forget

The chat I had with you.”

Here the muse got a little tired; but it ended up with unimpaired cheerfulness:

“I hope you are hale and well

And now I must say Addue,

Yours respectfully,

STAR.”

Over the page there was a charming P.S.:

“Perhaps you have younger fingers

The flowers to unfold,

Mine are rather clumsy

Being big and old.

Pleasant Hours,

Live long.”

It is the kind of little incident that seems to happen at Villino Loki, where animals and human beings are queer and unexpected, and live together in simplicity and cheerfulness.

V

Travelling along the pleasant path of life, on the reverse side of the hill, the downward course ‹how graphic is the French of it for the later and “smaller half” of our allotted span: sur le retour›, there is a tendency to dwell more upon memories and proportionately less on ambitions. The prospect now ahead, placid and mellowed as it may be, naturally dwindles to narrower margins. Its interest is more of the immediate order; deals mostly with hopes and doings of the coming season. And, the circle of recollection widening, things distant in the past appeal with proportionate insistency to the mind’s eye.

“DREAMING BACKWARDS”

I believe this is the case with all thinking creatures ‹says Loki’s Grandpa—who has fallen into a reminiscent mood›. With one whose lazy and musing propensities, whose delight in day-dreams has proved his paramount weakness, the habit of “dreaming backwards” and hunting for old impressions has become as haunting, in these years of the sixth decade, as was, in salad days, the “dreaming forward” and the straining for a sight of things still below the horizon.

For instance: in a life which has always been one of constant book-companionship, the printed passages which most delight me are those which, having been first read in another age and re-discovered in this one, bring back a pulse of some long forgotten impression. The impression may be one that sober and critical memory does not record as having been so particularly enthralling at the time—yet it now comes back with a subtle fragrance all its own.

The long darkness of winter provides the richest reading hours. And if the page-turning is by the side of a wood fire—as happens on this, the coldest day of the year—if it is in a deep armchair with the lamp throwing its quiet rays over one’s shoulder, why, it is apt to become interspersed with long spells of wide-eyed dreaming. The fire burns with that special clearness, that kind of conscious eagerness which one observes inside the hearth upon a keen frosty night. In the town a frosty night is but a cold night. But here, on our country hill-side, when winter, albeit officially over, is in reality still with us, a frosty night inevitably turns our thoughts to the threatened hopes of the garden.

Now, as one who knows practically nought of the gardener’s “Arte and Mysterie,” my interest in the matter is of the irresponsible kind. I look forward, of course, and keenly, to the satisfying display, first of our sappy, turgid fragrant Hyacinth beds in the Dutch Garden ‹somehow, the Dutch Garden seems to belong more particularly to my own side of the Villino—to be a precinct of my study in fact› than to the proud-pied array of the subsequent Tulips, nodding in the breeze over their bed of close clustering Forget-me-Nots. This is the annual treat provided in the spring—for Grandpa’s especial behoof at Villino Loki—by the industrious care of the knowledgeable ladies. Nevertheless, as I say, my interest is of the general order; not of details; not of ways and means. I expect, in the maturity of every season, delightful achievements, and find them; but I take little part in their planning. I am of no use for device and not called upon in council. I thankfully enjoy the results; and this is perhaps not the worst part the Master of the House could play in the year’s transaction.

Only on two occasions have I volunteered a suggestion with regard to planting—and both are related to early, very early, reminiscences.

Creepers of all sorts we have in profusion. Ivy, of course, and Jessamine and Honeysuckle, and the gorgeous, if short-lived, Virginia-Ampilopsis its name, I believe. But there is one thing, I pointed out, I must have also, and that is the blue clustering, the incomparably fragrant Glycine of my early childhood’s days. Wisteria is its proper English name.

Odoriferous bushes, again, we have, of every description. Ribes, Cassia, Gummy Cistus, what not?—lurk in ambuscade at the turning of paths to waylay you with their gush of essence, not to speak of the Azaleas in their banks; but all these perfumes, in their subtleness, belong to the middle years. No memories of the complete freshness of time cleave to them such as belong to the simple Sweet Briar.

So, now, the two rooted creatures of the Villino, which may be said to exist there more specially for the behoof of Loki’s Grandpa, are the Briar bushes at the end of the Lily Walk and by the Schöne Aussicht, and the still tender but promising Wisteria climbers in the re-entering and most sheltered corner of his study walls.

FLOWER LOVES OF CHILDHOOD

And it is for those young hopeful Wisterias that on this frosty night I feel a concern. Last year we had a score or so of purple clusters; we look to a goodly increase during the coming Renouveau.—‹You perceive the old, obsolete French word for Spring comes back of itself!› The anticipation of the near future, within the shrinking vista of coming pleasures, elicits as usual a return to the widening past. In this case the past that is recalled is that of a childhood spent in France.

The book lies forgotten on my knee. The brown Meerschaum grows cold in my hand. My eyes, lost in musings among the flame-fringed logs, now peer beyond the past half-century—at a time which seems verily as far distant and as little related to the present as that year 1636 stamped and still faintly discernible on the antique cast-iron backplate of the fireplace.... I see a farm-house in a village of that province which in ancient days was known as Ile-de-France ‹I hate your modern régime départements›, by name Mesnil-le-Roy; not far distant from Mantes, the natty little town on the upper and green-watered Seine, generally adverted to as Mantes-la-Jolie.

GLYCINE!

Therein, during nearly a whole year, for reasons of delicate health, resided a certain very small English boy—French enough in those tender years. In this delectable old place, so full of good-smelling things in their seasons: hay, and grain, and fruit, and at all times the health-restoring cow, the house was in the spring-time covered with Glycine. And with the adorable Glycine the small boy, who loved flowers as much as milk and fruits and beasts, fell forthwith in love.

How that coquettish Jappy plant came originally to find a footing in so rustic a corner as Mesnil-le-Roy is more than I can account for. Your French peasant is not, as a rule, addicted to the delights of flower raising; and, in those distant days, Wisteria was still something of a rarity anywhere. But there it was, already in the sturdiest strength of its age, embracing the old walls, forcing its fibrous wood into every cranny of the greystone, framing every window, striving up the chimney stacks—and filling the air with honey sweetness. It must have taken at least two score years to reach such a size.

With the English boy, then barely four, it was a first love. He feasted on it with his every sense. From morning till eve he would be sucking the base of some blue corolla plucked from its calyx, for the sake of that intense sweetness to which the thing owes its Gallic name of Glycine; he would, whenever he could, run round and rejoice his eyes with the delicacies of pale green and purple, drink in the scent, and listen hypnotized to the never-ceasing buzz of honey-seekers in the sunshine. And, in the morning, his first thought, as he crept out of his small truckle-bed, was to go and plunge his hands into the dew that glittered upon these Glycine branches nodding in from every side at the mansarde window.

Like all first loves it was, as you see, violent. Well do I remember how, for months after he was removed back into the Paris house, the small boy would ply his mother with the yearning question, infantilely incorrect but vernacular: “Quand que nous retournerons aux Glycines, Maman?” always to receive the non-committal but consoling:

“Tantôt ... tantôt.”

This “tantôt” is the wonderful “by-and-by” which never comes to be!

And like all first loves this one was utterly forgotten in later years—to reappear, however, in the sere and yellow of age. For years a many, a purple Wisteria spreading about the eaves of a south-country house, was to me only a purple Wisteria. It was a creeper, and it was nothing more. It was not a “Glycine” until I had a creepered wall of my own. Then it surged before imagination’s eye with all the glamour of les premières amours, to which, in accordance with the old French saw, “on en revient toujours.”

Now, therefore, at Villino Loki, nothing will serve but a Glycine to creep along those walls which are more especially my own; to embrace my south windows and nod in at the casement. And the suave-breathed Eastern beauty, first brought over to the West and god-fathered by Professor Wister, will privily remain Glycine for me; although I may draw the indulgent visitor’s attention to her under the better-known name of Wisteria Sinensis.—I have, by the way, an ever-ready pretext; for I learn from “The Language of Flowers” that the special significance of this blossom is “Welcome, fair stranger!” I mean to have a profusion of it, for old sake’s sake. Besides, is it not meet that Loki should not be deprived, during his villeggiatura, of the company of some Chinese living thing?

VI

Strange how sharp and detailed will some of our very early memories remain in after life, when even important scenes of our later years are so easily forgotten! That old farm of Mesnil-le-Roy is still a clear picture, vignetted, so to speak, upon grey pages of oblivion.... I can yet see the orchard, strewn with myriad fallen apples—the byres, whereto at sundown returned the slow-pacing, dreamy, placid-eyed milch cows; the giant walnut-tree, with one of its main branches blasted by lightning—blasted on the stormy night, during which “thunder had fallen” freely ‹as the little boy heard the labourers say, awe-struck, in the morning; but during which he had slept under the brown-tiled roof without the slightest disturbance›.... I can see the Four Banal, that co-operative bread-oven, a relic of mediæval institutions, which was still common enough in those days; where you could have such an entrancing view of lambent blue flames lined with yellow when the door stood open to receive the unbaked loaves; and where the air smelt so divinely of hot wheaten crust when they were removed on completion....

It was, by the way, on that alluring spot—the boy used to find his way there regularly on the days when on cuisait—that he heard a certain remark, which to his child ears had no special meaning, but which remained on memory’s tablets to assume later an interesting significance. The country folk were very kind. The little English boy, left for the good of his health at the farm of père Pelletier, was known to everybody; was accepted and treated as one of the community. Rarely did he stroll, as might any roaming puppy dog, into an open door of the village without being supplied with a generous sup of milk, or a tartine de raisiné; or again, in season, with a pomme cuite. The roasted apple, be it said, browning and lusciously oozing caramel, was a standing affair in that old-world village. There was, however, on that day, a benighted wayfarer who obviously could not reconcile with these rustic surroundings the yellow-haired, barelegged little boy gravely gazing at the glowing oven.

“D’ousqui sort, ce gosse-là?” ‹for which barbarous lingo I take leave to give as an equivalent: Who’s the kid?› asked the man. And the answer came: “Ça?—ca, mais le p’tit godem, donc.” ‹That—why, that’s the little “goddam.”›

THE LITTLE GODEM

Le petit godem!... Such was the name under which that young innocent was known at Mesnil-le-Roy, and, be it understood, in all cordiality and benevolence! Of a certainty not one of those excellent people had the remotest idea of the meaning of their “godem:” with them it was only the established equivalent for English.

The term is a noun, not an expletive, which has come down through five centuries—from the days, in fact, of the English occupation of France. Among the written records of those stirring times we come across many a passage in which a Duguesclin, a Maid of Orleans, or a Dunois is heard to mention hatefully “les godems,” or “les godons d’Angleterre.” Now, all that fertile country of the Vexin, the Ile-de-France and the Beauce, of which the fat farm land of my old père Pelletier was so fair a sample, was obstinately fought for by the English for the best part of a century. Mantes-la-Jolie—now mainly famed for its river terraces, its sweet water grapes and its savoury matelottes or eel stews—was once a fortified place of note, taken and retaken by French and English more than once; but finally captured ‹in 1418› by the noble Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, the Achilles of England, as the French themselves dubbed him, and firmly held by the “godems” for more than thirty years. To have heard that mispleasing word used dispassionately, merely as a substantive, is indeed a link with the past.

Strange paths of the musing thought, winding from Wisteria Sinensis to the days of our conquering English archer!

I spoke of these childhood memories as of oddly clear pictures emerging here and there out of grey mists of oblivion. Another now detaches itself in the same way from the clouds of the very distant past.

It belongs to the following summer. A perfume of Glycine still lingers about it, no doubt; for there again, upon the stone and through the curvetting iron-work balconies of the fair Louis XV house overlooking the park of St. Cloud, pale silvery green leafage, with here and there a cluster of faint blue, spreads in a well-regulated display—widely different, though, from the foaming profusion of the Mesnil. But the impression more specially associated with those happy St. Cloud days is the incense of the Sweet Briar.

SWEET EGLANTINE

What has happened—I pause and ask indignantly—to the Sweet-Briar of the world? Whither has the celestial, the entrancing scent of the true Eglantine vanished? Our twentieth century Briar is still—there is no gainsaying it—a delicious being, in its ephemeral exquisiteness of flower and its pleasant, if but slightly more lasting, leafy odour. But never, in subsequent life, have I captured again the sudden delight first brought to my childish nostrils by a puff of breeze that had passed over some hidden clump of sweet Eglantine. This first impression is connected with certain grassy alleys piercing deep the grand old-world park, or rather forest, of St. Cloud, which were my favourite playgrounds in the early sixties of the last century. ‹There is something distinctly suitable to the status of Grandpa, albeit merely “brevet” rank as in my case, in memorising thus about a past century!›

I can see the five-year-old arrested short upon the turf, in the midst of the hot pursuit of a blue butterfly, by his first whiff in life of Rosa Rubiginosa: so might a setter halt and stiffen, having got the wind of a grouse.—The source of the fitful stream of fragrance was hidden among clumps of forbidding brambles. Besides, there was no following the trail: it seemed ubiquitous. Like some Puck in his most tantalising mood, it would lead up and down, up and down—luring now to right, now to left, now straight ahead, anon seemed to whisk past from behind, until, in a kind of “dwam,” the child would give up the baffled purpose and pensively trot home by the nurse’s side.

For days the ambrosial fragrance dwelt in his little turned-up nose. It haunted the sensitive child-mind much as, later, in budding manhood, the remembrance of some enchanting face seen for an instant and then lost to sight. He had at last to confide his hopeless passion to his mother. It smelt ‹he explained› like the Pomme Reinette of the dessert plates, but oh, so much, so much better! The reference to the well-known and excellent variety of apple left no doubt about the nature of the plant which had exhaled the elusive trails of perfume. “Reinette” became the accepted name of the woodland charmer and the hunt for Reinette bushes in the more devious paths of the wood a daily occupation.