ch was to disinherit
Valentine, and who were leaving under the conviction of having done a
thing which could not fail of redounding considerably to their credit.

Chapter 61. How a Gardener May Get Rid of the Dormice that Eat His Peaches

Not on the same night, as he had intended, but the next morning, the
Count of Monte Cristo went out by the Barrier d'Enfer, taking the
road to Orleans. Leaving the village of Linas, without stopping at the
telegraph, which flourished its great bony arms as he passed, the count
reached the tower of Montlhery, situated, as every one knows, upon the
highest point of the plain of that name. At the foot of the hill the
count dismounted and began to ascend by a little winding path, about
eighteen inches wide; when he reached the summit he found himself
stopped by a hedge, upon which green fruit had succeeded to red and
white flowers.

Monte Cristo looked for the entrance to the enclosure, and was not long
in finding a little wooden gate, working on willow hinges, and fastened
with a nail and string. The count soon mastered the mechanism, the gate
opened, and he then found himself in a little garden, about twenty feet
long by twelve wide, bounded on one side by part of the hedge, which
contained the ingenious contrivance we have called a gate, and on the
other by the old tower, covered with ivy and studded with wall-flowers.
No one would have thought in looking at this old, weather-beaten,
floral-decked tower (which might be likened to an elderly dame dressed
up to receive her grandchildren at a birthday feast) that it would have
been capable of telling strange things, if,--in addition to the menacing
ears which the proverb says all walls are provided with,--it had also a
voice. The garden was crossed by a path of red gravel, edged by a border
of thick box, of many years' growth, and of a tone and color that would
have delighted the heart of Delacroix, our modern Rubens. This path was
formed in the shape of the figure of 8, thus, in its windings, making a
walk of sixty feet in a garden of only twenty.

Never had Flora, the fresh and smiling goddess of gardeners, been
honored with a purer or more scrupulous worship than that which was paid
to her in this little enclosure. In fact, of the twenty rose-trees which
formed the parterre, not one bore the mark of the slug, nor were there
evidences anywhere of the clustering aphis which is so destructive to
plants growing in a damp soil. And ye