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One of the two policemen is a shoemaker and cobbler. His pay, officially, is somewhere about a guinea a week. The Park, just now, is very agreeable to look at, shadowy with trees and shrubs, and with glimpses of green leaves and flower-gardens through the branches and twigs that line the iron fences. After a shower the hawthorn blossoms are delightfully fragrant.

Arched doorways are cut through the yews, and in one place, descending by broad and easy steps, there is a solemn, cool, and twilight walk formed by the overarching yews, the very place for religious meditation. Then, reascending, this sombre walk opens into air and sunshine amid delicious flower-gardens.

I set myself to do works of fancy, and to raise little flower-gardens, with many such innocent rural amusements; which, although they are not capable of affording any great pleasure, yet they give that serene turn to the mind which I think much preferable to anything else human nature is made susceptible of.

It was formed upon a gentle southern slope, with turfen terraces walled in on three sides, the fourth consisting of arches of golden yew. The duke had given this garden to Lady Corisande, in order that she might practise her theory, that flower-gardens should be sweet and luxuriant, and not hard and scentless imitations of works of art.

The windows of the drawing-room look out upon extensive flower-gardens, laid out in rather formal style with antique vases and statues. Beyond these gardens is seen a circular temple placed upon a knoll, the "mausoleum" which so moved Walpole.

The flower-gardens are a blaze of colours, and the orange trees give delicious fragrance as we ascend the terrace, ascend being hardly the word applicable to steps sloping so easily upwards, so nicely adjusted to the human foot that climbing Mont Blanc, under the same circumstances, would be accomplished without fatigue.

Nearly adjoining it on the north-western side was the elegant and commodious mansion of Barneveld, purchased by him from the representatives of the Arenberg family, surrounded by shrubberies and flower-gardens; not a palace, but a dignified and becoming abode for the first citizen of a powerful republic.

It falls on every leaf and shrub by the way-side; it is reflected from the crystal streams that, between grassy banks, wind amidst groves of fruit-trees into vineyards and flower-gardens. This is the place, this is the state, Of all that fear the Lord; Which men nor angels may relate With tongue, or pen, or word.

And in some places there are large flower-gardens, where the flowers grow without the use of the spade or the hoe. I would certainly like to take you to see the mountain, Edwin, if it were not so far away, but it would take us too long to go and come, for it is very much farther away than it seems."

The neat farm-houses were ornamented by creeping vines, and tiny flower-gardens in their fronts. Tall conical haystacks flanked the spacious, well-filled barns; big yellow pumpkins dotted the half-cleared cornfields; and handsome groups of cattle quietly ruminated in the pastures.