race. 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 th