His own children, and the children he happens to meet on the country road, a man regards with quite different eyes.  The strange, sunburnt brats returning from a primrose-hunt and laden with floral spoils, may be as healthy looking, as pretty, as well-behaved, as sweet-tempered, as neatly dressed as those that bear his name,—­may be in every respect as worthy of love and admiration; but then they have the misfortune not to belong to him.  That little fact makes a great difference.  He knows nothing about them; his acquaintance with them is born and dead in a moment.  I like my garden better than any other garden, for the same reason.  It is my own.  And ownership in such a matter implies a great deal.  When I first settled here, the ground around the house was sour moorland.  I made the walk, planted the trees, built the moss-house, erected the sun-dial, brought home the rhododendrons and fed them with the mould which they love so well.  I am the creator of every blossom, of every odour that comes and goes in the wind.  The rustle of my trees is to my ear what his child’s voice is to my friends the village doctor or the village clergyman.  I know the genealogy of every tree and plant in my garden.  I watch their growth as a father watches the growth of his children.  It is curious enough, as showing from what sources objects derive their importance, that if you have once planted a tree for other than commercial purposes,—­and in that case it is usually done by your orders and by the hands of hirelings,—­you have always in it a peculiar interest.  You care more for it than you care for all the forests of Norway or America. You have planted it, and that is sufficient to make it peculiar amongst the trees of the world.  This personal interest I take in every inmate of my garden, and this interest I have increased by sedulous watching.  But, really, trees and plants resemble human beings in many ways.  You shake a packet of seed into your forcing-frame; and while some grow, others pine and die, or struggle on under hereditary defect, showing indifferent blossoms late in the season, and succumb at length.  So far as one could discover, the seeds were originally alike,—­they received the same care, they were fed by the same moisture and sunlight; but of no two of them are the issues the same.  Do I not see something of this kind in the world of men, and can I not please myself with quaint analogies?  These plants and trees have their seasons of illness and their sudden deaths.  Your best rose-tree, whose fame has spread for twenty miles, is smitten by some fell disease; its leaves take an unhealthy hue, and in a day or so it is sapless,—­dead.  A tree of mine, the first last spring to put out its leaves, and which wore them till November, made this spring no green response to the call of the sunshine.  Marvelling what ailed it, I went to examine, and found it had been dead for months; and yet during the winter there had been no frost to speak of, and