been.
Suddenly his eyes opened wide. How was this? There was a hedge as neat,
as clipped, as any of Southampton in mid-season, and over it a glory of
roses, red and white and pink and yellow, waved gay banners to him in
trim luxuriance. He swung toward them, and the breeze brought him for
the first time in his life the fragrance of box in sunshine.

Four feet tall, shaven and thick and shining, the old hedge stood, and
the garnered sweetness of a hundred years' slow growth breathed
delicately from it toward the great-great-grandson of the man who
planted it. A box hedge takes as long in the making as a gentleman, and
when they are done the two are much of a sort. No plant in all the
garden has so subtle an air of breeding, so gentle a reserve, yet so
gracious a message of sweetness for all of the world who will stop to
learn it. It keeps a firm dignity under the stress of tempest when
lighter growths are tossed and torn; it shines bright through the snow;
it has a well-bred willingness to be background, with the well-bred gift
of presence, whether as background or foreground. The soul of the
box-tree is an aristocrat, and the sap that runs through it is the blue
blood of vegetation.

Saluting him bravely in the hot sunshine with its myriad shining
sword-points, the old hedge sent out to Philip on the May breeze its
ancient welcome of aromatic fragrance, and the tall roses crowded gayly
to look over its edge at the new master. Slowly, a little dazed at this
oasis of shining order in the neglected garden, he walked to the opening
and stepped inside the hedge. The rose garden! The famous rose garden of
Fairfield, and as his mother had described it, in full splendor of
cared-for, orderly bloom. Across the paths he stepped swiftly till he
stood amid the roses, giant bushes of Jacqueminot and Marechal Niel; of
pink and white and red and yellow blooms in thick array. The glory of
them intoxicated him. That he should own all of this beauty seemed too
good to be true, and instantly he wanted to taste his ownership. The
thought came to him that he would enter into his heritage with strong
hands here in the rose garden; he caught a deep-red Jacqueminot almost
roughly by its gorgeous head and broke off the stem. He would gather a
bunch, a huge, unreasonable bunch of his own flowers. Hungrily he broke
one after another; his shoulders bent over them, he was deep in the
bushes.

"I reckon I shall have to ask you not to pick any mo