parts of a choir. In the midst of all, where a broad path eddied
quite round an irregular open space, and that tender quaintness of decay
appeared which is the unfailing New Orleans touch, the space was filled
with roses. This spot was lovely enough by day and not less so for being
a haunt of toddling babes and their nurses; but at night--! Regularly at
evening there comes into the New Orleans air, from Heaven knows whither,
not a mist, not a fog nor a dampness, but a soft, transparent, poetical
dimness that in no wise shortens the range of vision--a counterpart of
that condition which so many thousands of favored travellers in other
longitudes know as the "Atlantic haze." One night--oh, oftener than
that, but let us say one for the value of understatement--returning to
our quarters some time before midnight, we stepped out upon the balcony
to gaze across into that garden. The sky was clear, the neighborhood
silent. A wind stirred, but the shrubberies stood motionless. The moon,
nearly full, swung directly before us, pouring its gracious light
through the tenuous cross-hatchings of the pecans, nestling it in the
dense tops of the cedars and magnolias and sprinkling it to the ground
among the lower growths and between their green-black shadows. When in a
certain impotence of rapture we cast about in our minds for an adequate
comparison--where description in words seemed impossible--the only
parallel we could find was the art of Corot and such masters from the
lands where the wonderful pictorial value of trees trimmed high has been
known for centuries and is still cherished. For without those trees so
disciplined the ravishing picture of that garden would have been
impossible.

Of course our Northern gardens cannot smile like that in winter. But
they need not perish, as tens of thousands of lawn-mower, pattern-bed,
so-called gardens do. They should but hibernate, as snugly as the bear,
the squirrel, the bee; and who that ever in full health of mind and body
saw spring come back to a Northern garden of blossoming trees, shrubs
and undershrubs has not rejoiced in a year of four clear-cut seasons? Or
who that ever saw mating birds, greening swards, starting violets and
all the early flowers loved of Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley, Bryant and
Tennyson, has not felt that the resurrection of landscape and garden
owes at least half its glory to the long trance of winter, and wished
that dwellers in Creole lands might see New Englan