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"Didn't she know she was dying?" asked Mina, who had established her footing by a hypocritical show of interest in the cottage-gardens. "Oh, yes, she knew she was dying, my dear," said Miss S. What poor Lady Tristram might have known, but apparently had not, was left to an obvious inference. "She was very kind," remarked Mrs Iver.
Oh, different from the long irregular slips of the cottage-gardens, with their gay bunches of polyanthuses and crocuses, their wallflowers sending sweet odours through the narrow casement, and their gooseberry-trees bursting into a brilliancy of leaf, whose vivid greenness has the effect of a blossom on the eye! Oh, how different!
Turning again up the hill, we find ourselves on that peculiar charm of English scenery, a green common, divided by the road; the right side fringed by hedgerows and trees, with cottages and farmhouses irregularly placed, and terminated by a double avenue of noble oaks; the left, prettier still, dappled by bright pools of water, and islands of cottages and cottage-gardens, and sinking gradually down to cornfields and meadows, and an old farmhouse, with pointed roofs and clustered chimneys, looking out from its blooming orchard, and backed by woody hills.
The charm and poetry of the country walk are destroyed by motoring demons, and the wayside cottage-gardens, once the most attractive feature of the English landscape, are ruined. The elder England, too, is vanishing in the modes, habits, and manners of her people.
Bible-readings, a savings-bank, and cottage-gardens were so inextricably mingled in it that the beneficiary, if she liked one, had to go in for them all. "Just my object," Miss Swinkerton would remark triumphantly as she set the flower-pots down on the Bibles, only to find that the bank-books had got stored away with the seed. Clearly Mrs Iver, chief aide-de-camp, had no leisure.
Thus reflecting, the Corporal turned along the path that led through the woods lying above the village, stopped when he saw the roofs of the cottages below him, and went down through the covert towards the hedge that parted the cottage-gardens from it. It was dusk, so that he had little difficulty in remaining unseen, and as he drew nearer to the two cottages where Mrs. Fry and Mrs.
They were not, we thought, quite so large and luxuriant as those which we see in our cottage-gardens at home; and this remark we found afterwards would apply to the more carefully tended plants in the pleasure-grounds of palaces. We are probably more skilful in the adaptation of soil to foreign importations, and therefore succeed in producing a finer flower.
Each, however poor, had a wild garden around it, and, where the inhabitants possessed some pride in their surroundings, the roses and the jasmines and that distinguished creeper, which one sees nowhere at its best but in Devonshire cottage-gardens, the stately cotoneaster, made the whole place a bower.
The sunlight did not seem to be in the sky, in the air or on the sea; but when you turned to the southern arm of the bay, where the low line of green hills ran out into the water, there you could see the strong clear light shining shining on the green fields and on the sharp black lines of hedges, on that bit of gray old town with its cottage-gardens and its sea-wall, and on the line of dark rock that formed the point of the promontory.
Lavender reminded her of old customs, she said, and of homely cottage-gardens, and many a cottager made his offering to her of a bundle of lavender.
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