my mother, who detested London and
worshipped her garden, used to return with her family to Woburn, in time
to superintend the "bedding-out." My first memory is connected with my
home in London; my second with my home in the country, and the
rejoicings for the termination of the Crimean War.

Under the date of May 29, 1856, we read in _Annals of Our Time_,
"Throughout the Kingdom, the day was marked by a cessation from work,
and, during the night, illuminations and fireworks were all but
universal." The banners and bands of the triumphal procession which
paraded the streets of our little town--scarcely more than a village in
dimensions--made as strong an impression on my mind as the conflagration
which had startled all London in the previous March.

People who have only known me as a double-dyed Londoner always seem to
find a difficulty in believing that I once was a countryman; yet, for
the first twenty-five years of my life, I lived almost entirely in the
country. "We could never have loved the earth so well, if we had had no
childhood in it--if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up
again every spring, that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we
sat lisping to ourselves on the grass--the same hips and haws on the
autumn hedgerows.... One's delight in an elderberry bush overhanging the
confused leafage of a hedgerow bank, as a more gladdening sight than the
finest cistus or fuchsia spreading itself on the softest undulating
turf, is an entirely unjustifiable preference to a Nursery-Gardener. And
there is no better reason for preferring this elderberry bush than that
it stirs an early memory--that it is no novelty in my life, speaking to
me merely through my present sensibilities to form and colour, but the
long companion of my existence, that wove itself into my joys when joys
were vivid."

I had the unspeakable advantage of being reared in close contact with
Nature, in an aspect beautiful and wild. My father's house was
remarkable for its pretty garden, laid out with the old-fashioned
intricacy of pattern, and blazing, even into autumn, with varied colour.
In the midst of it, a large and absolutely symmetrical cedar "spread its
dark green layers of shade," and supplied us in summer with a kind of
_al fresco_ sitting-room. The background of the garden was formed by the
towering trees of Woburn Park; and close by there were great tracts of
woodland, which stretch far into Buckinghamshire, and hav