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They made a rushing noise louder than formerly, and bore it onwards more vigorously; and before it was well aware of it, it found itself in a garden, where the apple-trees were in blossom, and where the syringas sent forth their fragrance, and their long green branches hung down in the clear stream. Just then three beautiful white swans came out of the thicket.

Some strange spell, exhaled from the unchanging aspect of the old house and the old people, fell on me, and, though I tried several times, I could not find a suitable opening. On Sunday morning grandfather asked me if I would help him to get out to Jed's grave. The peonies and syringas were in bloom, and grandmother had the bouquet made up ready.

Looking from her bedroom casements over the syringas and lilacs and larches, the laburnums and hawthorns and hollies of the low-walled garden that ended at the sheer cliff-edge, from whence you looked down upon the tops of the pines and chestnuts, whose green foliage hid the shining metals of the iron way, and made a sea of verdure in place of the salt blue waves that once had lapped and sighed there gazing across the powdery sand-dunes that were prickly with sea-holly and gay with flaunting poppies and purple scabious, the pink and white convolvulus, and the thorny yellow dwarf rose, that somehow finds nourishment in the pale sand of Herion Links, to the line of white breakers that rose and fell more than a mile away.

Yet Nature is never wholly unkind. Economical as she was in my unparadised Eden, hard as it was to make some of my floral houris unveil, still the damask roses sweetened the June breezes, the bladed and plumed flower-de-luces unfolded their close-wrapped cones, and larkspurs and lupins, lady's delights, plebeian manifestations of the pansy, self-sowing marigolds, hollyhocks, the forest flowers of two seasons, and the perennial lilacs and syringas, all whispered to' the winds blowing over them that some caressing presence was around me.

In the old colonial mansion in which he was born, he dwelt in the embowering leafage, amid the quiet of lawns and garden-plots broken by few noises ruder than those from the elms and the syringas where "The oriole clattered and the cat-bird sang."

There was a hearty "Good-morning," significant from him as he stood among the syringas, and there were sandwiches and strawberries in profusion, a plain bread-and-butter atmosphere very pleasant to us after a long and dusty tramp.

He fluttered slowly to the ground and paused for a few minutes under a thicket of syringas, and while he was gazing about him, there walked slowly past a flock of the same beautiful birds he had seen so many months ago. Fascinated, he watched them one by one step into the canal, and float quietly upon the waters as if they were part of them.

Yet Nature is never wholly unkind. Economical as she was in my unparadised Eden, hard as it was to make some of my floral houris unveil, still the damask roses sweetened the June breezes, the bladed and plumed flower-de-luces unfolded their close-wrapped cones, and larkspurs and lupins, lady's delights, plebeian manifestations of the pansy, self-sowing marigolds, hollyhocks, the forest flowers of two seasons, and the perennial lilacs and syringas, all whispered to' the winds blowing over them that some caressing presence was around me.

Behind him the violin was telling of the springtime; from the garden came the smell of the syringas; the young man's desire was toward a woman. "Is she playing her harp to-night? is she playing to Ludwell Cary?" "Belle saison de ma jeunesse Beaux jours du printemps!" sang the violin. A shot sounded near the house.

The church stood at one end of the village in the middle of a beautiful churchyard and burying-ground, surrounded by fine trees flowering chestnuts and sweet-scented limes, while every here and there blossomed beautiful red May-trees, lilacs, laburnums, syringas and roses.