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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."

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."

Sometimes the little girl was raking the garden-plots in her neat garden; sometimes she was weeding the paths; sometimes she was kneeling at her beehive with fresh flowers for her bees, and sometimes she was in the hen-yard scattering corn among the eager little chickens.

Milly fled to her bedroom; the long, low room, so perfect in its simplicity, its windows looking away into the sunshine over the pleasant boughs of orchards and garden-plots and the gray shingled roofs of old houses the room from which on that November evening Milly's spirit had been absent while Ian, the lover whom she had never known, had watched his Beloved, the Desire of his soul and sense, returning to him from the unimagined limbo to which she had again withdrawn.

They did not have the cheery, buoyant ugliness of pioneer homes in an unsettled country, for behind them were the ruins of the old village, fragments of blackened wall, stone chimneys filled with accumulations of rubbish, garden-plots choked with weeds, reminding us that here was no outpost of a new civilization, but the desolation of an old one, fallen upon evil days.

This question, frightful in itself, becomes appalling when we note that these dwelling-houses are shut in on the side towards the Rue de Richelieu by marshy ground, by a sea of tumbled paving-stones between them and the Tuileries, by little garden-plots and suspicious-looking hovels on the side of the great galleries, and by a desert of building-stone and old rubbish on the side towards the old Louvre.

The wooden houses, with their jutting stories and quaint gable-peaks; the doorsteps and thresholds, with the early grass springing up about them; the garden-plots, black with freshly turned earth; the wheel-track, little worn, and, even in the market-place, margined with green on either side;—all were visible, but with a singularity of aspect that seemed to give another moral interpretation to the things of this world than they had ever borne before.

The French travellers could not sufficiently admire the astonishing order in which the plantations of yams and bananas were kept, the excessive neatness of their dwellings, and the beauty of the garden-plots.

Therefore in negotiating this delectable spot, one shapes a laborious course through a series of back yards and garden-plots, littered with broken furniture and brick rubble, allowing the rifle-bullets the undisputed use of the street.

Those down below came clambering up, the punts came poling with a rush of foam, and a ripple ran along the edge of Stratford town like the wind through a field of wheat. Windows creaked and doors swung wide, and the workmen stopped in the garden-plots to lean upon their mattocks and to look.