Nevertheless, it was unmistakably hot—­a heat homelike in its intensity, yet of a different effect, throwing him into languid reverie rather than filling his veins with fire.  Secure in his seclusion in the leafy chase, he took off his jacket and rambled on in his shirt sleeves.  Through the opening he presently saw the abbey again, with the restored wing where the noble owner lived for two or three weeks in the year, but now given over to the prevailing solitude.  And then, issuing from the chase, he came upon a broad, moss-grown terrace.  Before him stretched a tangled and luxuriant wilderness of shrubs and flowers, darkened by cypress and cedars of Lebanon; its dun depths illuminated by dazzling white statues, vases, trellises, and paved paths, choked and lost in the trailing growths of years of abandonment and forgetfulness.  He consulted his guide-book again.  It was the “old Italian garden,” constructed under the design of a famous Italian gardener by the third duke; but its studied formality being displeasing to his successor, it was allowed to fall into picturesque decay and negligent profusion, which were not, however, disturbed by later descendants,—­a fact deplored by the artistic writer of the guide-book, who mournfully called attention to the rare beauty of the marble statues, urns, and fountains, ruined by neglect, although one or two of the rarer objects had been removed to Deep Dene Lodge, another seat of the present duke.

It is needless to say that Mr. Potter conceived at once a humorous opposition to the artistic enthusiasm of the critic, and, plunging into the garden, took a mischievous delight in its wildness and the victorious struggle of nature with the formality of art.  At every step through the tangled labyrinth he could see where precision and order had been invaded, and even the rigid masonry broken or upheaved by the rebellious force.  Yet here and there the two powers had combined to offer an example of beauty neither could have effected alone.  A passion vine had overrun and enclasped a vase with a perfect symmetry no sculptor could have achieved.  A heavy balustrade was made ethereal with a delicate fretwork of vegetation between its balusters like lace.  Here, however, the lap and gurgle of water fell gratefully upon the ear of the perspiring and thirsty Mr. Potter, and turned his attention to more material things.  Following the sound, he presently came upon an enormous oblong marble basin containing three time-worn fountains with grouped figures.  The pipes were empty, silent, and choked with reeds and water plants, but the great basin itself was filled with water from some invisible source.

A terraced walk occupied one side of the long parallelogram; at intervals and along the opposite bank, half shadowed by willows, tinted marble figures of tritons, fauns, and dryads arose half hidden in the reeds.  They were more or less mutilated by time, and here and there only the empty, moss-covered plinths that had once supported them could be seen.  But they were so lifelike in their subdued color in the shade that he was for a moment startled.