If all the structures are not equally ornamental and if piazza, stable and shed stand out noticeably against the dwelling-house, yet there is nowhere lacking a quality which adorns more than beauty of form and shining ornamentation.  Extreme cleanliness smiles at the observer from the most hidden corners.  In the little garden it reaches such a pitch that it hardly dares to smile.  The garden does not look as if it were cleaned with a hoe and broom; it looks as if it had been brushed.  The little beds that stand out so sharply against the yellow gravel of the walks look, not as if they had been dug by a cord, but as if they were drawn on the ground with a ruler and compasses, the box edging has the air of being daily attended to by the most accurate barber in town with comb and razor.  And yet the blue coat which, if one stands on the piazza, one may see twice daily stepping into the little garden and every day at exactly the same minute, is still more neatly kept than the garden.  When, after doing various pieces of work, the old gentleman leaves the garden again—­and every day he goes at the same minute, just as punctually as he comes—­the white apron over his blue coat shines with such unblemished whiteness that it is really incomprehensible why the old gentleman should have put it on.  When he moves about among the tall rose-bushes which seem to have taken the old gentleman’s bearing for a model, each of his steps is like the other, none is longer or fails to keep the regularity of his tempo.  If one looks at him closer as he stands thus in the middle of his creation, one sees that he has merely copied externally that of which nature has created the model in himself.  The regularity of the different parts of his tall figure seems to have been as accurately measured as the beds of the little garden.  When nature formed him, her countenance must have borne the same expression of conscientiousness as the old man’s face—­an expression which, because of its strength, would appear to be obstinacy if an expression of loving gentleness, indeed almost of dreamy enthusiasm, were not mixed with it.  And even now nature seems to watch over him with the same care that his eye shows when it looks over his little garden.  His hair, cut short at the back and twisted above his brow into a so-called “corkscrew-curl,” is of the same unblemished whiteness that is shown by his neckerchief, waistcoat, collar and the apron over his buttoned-up coat.  Here, in his little garden, he completes the finished picture that it presents; away from home his appearance and personality must appear a little odd.  His hat still has the high pointed crown, his blue overcoat the narrow collar and padded shoulders of a long vanished fashion.  These offer opportunities enough for bad jokes; but no one makes them.  It is as if there were an invisible something emanating from the stately figure that prevents the rise of flippant thoughts.