rnival at Nice. Nay, a still simpler case: if we cannot be happy
without a garden as big as the grounds of an expensive lunatic asylum,
why, then, all the little cottage gardens down the lane must be swept
away to make it.

Now, the cottage gardens, believe me, are the best. They are the only
ones which, being small, may be allotted in some juster future to every
man without dispossessing his neighbour. And they are also the only ones
compatible with that fine arable or dairy country which we all long for.
Stop and look over the hedges: their flowers leave no scrap of earth
visible between them, like the bedded-out things of grander gardens; and
their vivid crimsons, and tender rose and yellow, and ineffable blue,
and the solemn white which comes out in the evening, are seen to most
advantage against the silvery green of vegetables behind them, and the
cornfield, the chalk-pit under the beech trees beyond. The cottage
flowers come also into closer quarters with their owners, not merely
because these breathe their fragrance and the soil's good freshness
while stooping down to weed, and prune, and water; but also, and perhaps
even more, because the flowers we tend with our own hands have a habit
of blooming in our expectations and filling our hopes with a sweetness
which not the most skilful hired gardeners have ever taught the most
far-fetched hybrids that they raise for clients.

Which, being interpreted, may be taken to mean that it is no use relying
on artists, poets, philosophers, or saints to make something of the
enclosed spaces or the waste portions of our soul: _Il faut cultiver
notre jardin._

IN PRAISE OF GOVERNESSES

Even before discovering that there was an old, gabled, lower town at
Cassel, I felt the special gladness of the touch of Germany. It was an
autumn morning, bright yet tender. I sped along the wide, empty streets,
across the sanded square, with hedges of sere lime trees, where a big,
periwigged Roman Emperor of an Elector presides, making one think of the
shouts of "Hurrah, lads, for America!" of the bought and sold Hessians
of Schiller's "Cabal and Love." At the other end was a promenade,
terraced above the yellow tree-tops of a park, above a gentle undulating
country, with villages and steeples in the distance. "Schoeneaussicht"
the place called itself; and the view was looked at by the wide and many
windows of pleasant old-fashioned houses, with cocked-hat roofs well
pulled down over