The sweet-scented verbena is one of the commonest and most successful shrubs in a Natal garden, and just now the large bushes of it which one sees in every direction are covered by tapering spikes of its tiny white blossoms.  But the feature of this garden was roses—­roses on each side whichever way you turned, and I should think of at least a hundred different sorts.  Not the stiff standard rose tree of an English garden, with its few precious blossoms, to be looked at from a distance and admired with respectful gravity.  No:  in this garden the roses grow as they might have grown in Eden—­untrained, unpruned, in enormous bushes covered entirely by magnificent blossoms, each bloom of which would have won a prize at a rose-show.  There was one cloth-of-gold rose bush that I shall never forget—­its size, its fragrance, its wealth of creamy-yellowish blossoms.  A few yards off stood a still bigger and more luxuriant pyramid, some ten feet high, covered with the large, delicate and regular pink bloom of the souvenir de Malmaison.  When I talk of a bush I only mean one especial bush which caught my eye.  I suppose there were fifty cloth-of-gold and fifty souvenir rose bushes in that garden.  Red roses, white roses, tea roses, blush-roses, moss roses, and, last not least, the dear old-fashioned, homely cabbage rose, sweetest and most sturdy of all.  You could wander for acres and acres among fruit trees and plantations of oaks and willows and other trees, but you never got away from the roses.  There they were, beautiful, delicious things at every turn—­hedges of them, screens of them and giant bushes of them on either hand.  As I have said before, though kept free from weeds by some half dozen scantily-clad but stalwart Kafirs with their awkward hoes, it was not a bit like a trim English garden.  It was like a garden in which Lalla Rookh might have wandered by moonlight talking sentimental philosophy with her minstrel prince under old Fadladeen’s chaperonage, or a garden that Boccaccio might have peopled with his Arcadian fine ladies and gentlemen.  It was emphatically a poet’s or a painter’s garden, not a gardener’s garden.  Then, as though nothing should be wanting to make the scene lovely, one could hear through the fragrant silence the tinkling of the little “spruit” or brook at the bottom of the garden, and the sweet song of the Cape canary, the same sort of greenish finch which is the parent stock of all our canaries, and whose acquaintance I first made in Madeira.  A very sweet warbler it is, and the clear, flute-like notes sounded prettily among the roses.  From blossom to blossom lovely butterflies flitted, perching quite fearlessly on the red clay walk just before me, folding and unfolding their big painted wings.  Every day I see a new kind of butterfly, and the moths which one comes upon hidden away under the leaves of the creepers during the bright noisy day are lovely beyond the power of words.  One little fellow is a great pet of mine.  He wears pure white wings, with vermilion stripes drawn in regular horizontal lines across his back, and between the lines are shorter, broken streaks of black, which is at once neat and uncommon; but he is always in the last stage of sleepiness when I see him.