The house I dwell in stands apart from the little town, and relates itself to the houses as I do to the inhabitants.  It sees everything, but is itself unseen, or, at all events, unregarded.  My study-window looks down upon Dreamthorp like a meditative eye.  Without meaning it, I feel I am a spy on the on-goings of the quiet place.  Around my house there is an old-fashioned rambling garden, with close-shaven grassy plots, and fantastically clipped yews which have gathered their darkness from a hundred summers and winters; and sun-dials in which the sun is constantly telling his age; and statues green with neglect and the stains of the weather.  The garden I love more than any place on earth; it is a better study than the room inside the house which is dignified by that name.  I like to pace its gravelled walks, to sit in the moss-house, which is warm and cosey as a bird’s nest, and wherein twilight dwells at noonday; to enjoy the feast of colour spread for me in the curiously shaped floral spaces.  My garden, with its silence and the pulses of fragrance that come and go on the airy undulations, affects me like sweet music.  Care stops at the gates, and gazes at me wistfully through the bars.  Among my flowers and trees Nature takes me into her own hands, and I breathe freely as the first man.  It is curious, pathetic almost, I sometimes think, how deeply seated in the human heart is the liking for gardens and gardening.  The sickly seamstress in the narrow city lane tends her box of sicklier mignonette.  The retired merchant is as fond of tulips as ever was Dutchman during the famous mania.  The author finds a garden the best place to think out his thought.  In the disabled statesman every restless throb of regret or ambition is stilled when he looks upon his blossomed apple-trees.  Is the fancy too far brought that this love for gardens is a reminiscence haunting the race of that remote time in the world’s dawn when but two persons existed,—­a gardener named Adam, and a gardener’s wife called Eve?

When I walk out of my house into my garden I walk out of my habitual self, my every-day thoughts, my customariness of joy or sorrow by which I recognise and assure myself of my own identity.  These I leave behind me for a time, as the bather leaves his garments on the beach.  This piece of garden-ground, in extent barely a square acre, is a kingdom with its own interests, annals, and incidents.  Something is always happening in it.  To-day is always different from yesterday.  This spring a chaffinch built a nest in one of my yew-trees.  The particular yew which the bird did me the honour to select had been clipped long ago into a similitude of Adam, and, in fact, went by his name.  The resemblance to a human figure was, of course, remote, but the intention was evident.  In the black shock head of our first parent did the birds establish their habitation.  A prettier, rounder, more comfortable nest I never saw, and many a wild swing it got when Adam bent his