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"It's the worst part of the job and perhaps the most awkward thing I've done," he said one night. "If the frame came down with the rockwork filling, it might start the rest and shake some length of road." "But there's no reason it should come down," Charnock argued. "Not in a way, but I'm glad Kerr authorized the extra brace.

It was rapture to take a carriage, and drive, not to the cemetery, not to the public library, not to the rooms of the Young Men's Christian Association, or the grain elevators, or the new park just tricked out with rockwork and sprigs of evergreen, not to any of the charming resorts of our own cities, but as in Europe to the churches, the churches of a pitiless superstition, the churches with their atrocious pictures and statues, their lingering smell of the morning's incense, their confessionals, their fee-taking sacristans, their worshippers dropped here and there upon their knees about the aisles and saying their prayers with shut or wandering eyes according as they were old women or young!

The ruins of Ewloe Castle, six hundred years old, are not far away, but so buried in foliage that they are difficult to find. Two miles from Chester is Hoole House, formerly Lady Broughton's, famous for its rockwork, a lawn of less than an acre exquisitely planted with clipped yews and other trees being surrounded by a rockery over forty feet high.

The ground shook, and flying fragments of ballast beat upon his turned-down hat; there was a deafening roar as the cars jolted past, and he saw the rails spring. Then the wind that buffeted him changed to eddying puffs, the noise receded, and he lifted his bent head. The rockwork stood firm, the ends of the timbers had not moved, and only a few small heaps of gravel had fallen from the road-bed.

It had once been an orchard, and some of the trees were still standing. In the centre, rising out of a pile of rockwork, he had placed a crucifix that had been found upon the roadside and had surrounded it with flowers.

Merry but orderly sightseers thronged its alleys, and stared with wondering admiration at a rather attenuated jet of water which rose into the clear air some thirty feet above a rockwork fountain in the centre.

In his mirror frames he introduced a peculiar bird with a long snipe-like beak, and rather impossible wings, an imitation of rockwork and dripping water, Chinese figures with pagodas and umbrellas; and sometimes the illustration of Aesop's fables interspersed with scrolls and flowers.

Between a charcoal dealer's dark shop and an undertaker's establishment, where the spruce boards leaning against the wall cause him to shudder, is a porte-cochère surmounted by a sign, the word "BATHS" on a dull lantern. He enters and crosses a damp little garden where a fountain weeps in a basin of artificial rockwork. That is just the dismal retreat he has been seeking.

This species is of half-scandent habit, with large, trifoliolate leaves, which turn of various tints of red and crimson in the autumn. It is quite hardy, and seen to best advantage when allowed to run over large rockwork and tree stumps in partial shade. The variety R. toxicodendron radicans has ample foliage, and is suited for similar places to the last.

The saucer in which he mixes his ink is in itself a little gem. It is chiselled out of a piece of jade, and represents a tiny lake with a carved border imitating rockwork. On this border is a little mamma toad, also in jade, advancing as if to bathe in the little lake in which M. Sucre carefully keeps a few drops of very dark liquid.