I had been practically all my life enjoying gardens of various kinds, but I had given attention to their creations without giving a thought to their creation; I had taken the gifts of Flora, I would have said if I had been writing a hundred years ago, without studying the features or the figure of the goddess herself. If I were hard pressed for time and space I would say directly that I lived among flowers, but knew nothing of gardens. I had never troubled myself to inquire into the details of a garden's charm. I had watched gardeners working and idling, mowing and watering, tying up and cutting down, but I had never had a chance of watching a real gardener making a garden. It is generally assumed that the first gardener that the world has known was Adam. A clergyman told me so with the smile that comes with the achievement of a satisfactory benefice--the indulgent smile of the higher criticism for the Book of Genesis. But people who agree with that assumption cannot have read the Book with the attention it deserves, or they would have seen that it was the Creator of all Who planted the first garden, and there are people alive to-day who are ready to affirm that He worked conscientiously on the lines laid down by Le Notre. Most gardeners whom I have seen at work appeared to me to be well aware of the fact that the garden was given to man as a beatitude, and that agriculture came later and in the form of a Curse; and in accordance with this assurance they decline to labour in such a way as to make the terms of the Curse apply to themselves. If they wipe their brows with their shirt-sleeve, it is only because that is the traditional movement which precedes the consulting of their watch to see if that five minutes before the striking of the stable clock for the dinner hour will allow of their putting on their coats. A friend of mine who had been reading Darwin and Wallace and Lyell and Huxley and the rest of them, greatly to the detriment of his interpretation of some passages in the Pentateuch, declared that the record of the incident of the Garden Designer in the first chapters of Genesis, being unable to do anything with his gardener and being obliged (making use of a Shakespearian idiom) to fire him out, showed such a knowledge of the trade, that, Darwin or no Darwin, he would accept the account of the transaction without reservation.