sea of meadow-grass, smooth and coloured, stretching in front, islanded
about with oak, and elm, and ash.

The finches came to the boughs that hung over the ivy-grown thatch, and
sang in the sycamore opposite the door, and in the apple-trees, whose
bloom hung down almost to the ground.

These apple-trees, which Iden had planted, flung sackfuls of bloom at
his feet. They poured themselves out in abandoned, open-armed,
spendthrift, wasteful--perfectly prodigal--quantities of rose-tinted
petal; prodigal as a river which flows full to the brim, never
questioning but what there will be plenty of water to follow.

Flowers, and trees, and grass, seemed to spring up wherever Iden set
down his foot: fruit and flowers fell from the air down upon him. It was
his genius to make things grow--like sunshine and shower; a sort of Pan,
a half-god of leaves and boughs, and reeds and streams, a sort of Nature
in human shape, moving about and sowing Plenty and Beauty.

One side of the summer-house was a thick holly-bush, Iden had set it
there; he builded the summer-house and set the ivy; and the pippin at
the back, whose bloom was white; the copper-birch near by; the great
sycamore alone had been there before him, but he set a seat under it,
and got woodbine to flower there; the drooping-ash he planted, and if
Amaryllis stood under it when the tree was in full leaf you could not
see her, it made so complete an arbour; the Spanish oak in the corner;
the box hedge along the ha-ha parapet; the red currants against the red
wall; the big peony yonder; the damsons and pear; the yellow honey-bush;
all these, and this was but one square, one mosaic of the garden, half
of it sward, too, and besides these there was the rhubarb-patch at one
corner; fruit, flowers, plants, and herbs, lavender, parsley, which has
a very pleasant green, growing in a thick bunch, roses, pale sage--read
Boccaccio and the sad story of the leaf of sage--ask Nature if you wish
to know how many things more there were.

A place to eat and drink, and think of nothing in, listening to the
goldfinches, and watching them carry up the moss, and lichen, and
slender fibres for their nest in the fork of the apple; listening to the
swallows as they twittered past, or stayed on the sharp, high top of the
pear tree; to the vehement starlings, whistling and screeching like Mrs.
Iden herself, on the chimneys; chaffinches "chink, chink," thrushes,
distant blackbirds, who like oaks; "cuc