“Oh, I’d love that!” I cried.  “Do you think the Doctor would let me?”

“Certainly,” said Polynesia—­“as soon as you have learned something about doctoring.  I’ll speak of it to him myself—­Sh!  I hear him coming.  Quick—­bring his bacon back on to the table.”

THE NINTH CHAPTER

THE GARDEN OF DREAMS

When breakfast was over the Doctor took me out to show me the garden.  Well, if the house had been interesting, the garden was a hundred times more so.  Of all the gardens I have ever seen that was the most delightful, the most fascinating.  At first you did not realize how big it was.  You never seemed to come to the end of it.  When at last you were quite sure that you had seen it all, you would peer over a hedge, or turn a corner, or look up some steps, and there was a whole new part you never expected to find.

It had everything—­everything a garden can have, or ever has had.  There were wide, wide lawns with carved stone seats, green with moss.  Over the lawns hung weeping-willows, and their feathery bough-tips brushed the velvet grass when they swung with the wind.  The old flagged paths had high, clipped, yew hedges either side of them, so that they looked like the narrow streets of some old town; and through the hedges, doorways had been made; and over the doorways were shapes like vases and peacocks and half-moons all trimmed out of the living trees.  There was a lovely marble fish-pond with golden carp and blue water-lilies in it and big green frogs.  A high brick wall alongside the kitchen garden was all covered with pink and yellow peaches ripening in the sun.  There was a wonderful great oak, hollow in the trunk, big enough for four men to hide inside.  Many summer-houses there were, too—­some of wood and some of stone; and one of them was full of books to read.  In a corner, among some rocks and ferns, was an outdoor fire-place, where the Doctor used to fry liver and bacon when he had a notion to take his meals in the open air.  There was a couch as well on which he used to sleep, it seems, on warm summer nights when the nightingales were singing at their best; it had wheels on it so it could be moved about under any tree they sang in.  But the thing that fascinated me most of all was a tiny little tree-house, high up in the top branches of a great elm, with a long rope ladder leading to it.  The Doctor told me he used it for looking at the moon and the stars through a telescope.

It was the kind of a garden where you could wander and explore for days and days—­always coming upon something new, always glad to find the old spots over again.  That first time that I saw the Doctor’s garden I was so charmed by it that I felt I would like to live in it—­always and always—­ and never go outside of it again.  For it had everything within its walls to give happiness, to make living pleasant—­to keep the heart at peace.  It was the Garden of Dreams.