On a level with the top of the low wall is another garden bed. You see the ground is rising, rising up to the clouds all the time at the back of the cottage, just as it is falling, falling down to the river in the valley all the time in front of the cottage. This next terrace bed loses itself entirely in a miniature wild wood and drops down into a tiny dell, just big enough for a couple of small children to give a tea-party to the fairies in. Here it is that the beauty of the whole place seems to climax. The other side of the dell is bounded by a large grey boulder, about six feet high, flanked by a few smaller ones tumbling about at various angles. The stone was too big for the original gardener to move, so he wisely left it where it was. They often do that on these hills. I know one cottage that has a most substantial stone table in the centre of the kitchen. It is just a huge stone that was too big to move by ordinary methods when they erected the cottage, and so they simply left it, and built the kitchen round it. But my boulder in the grotto is not so much for use as for beauty. True, it supports a plum tree that springs up from behind it, just outside the orchard rails. But the way Nature has festooned that rock is worth going a long way to study. From the ground at one side springs a wild rose with stout stems that grow fairly straight and erect, considering it is a wild rose, and this sends out long curved and arched sprays, dotted with pink blossoms. At the other side is a yellow jasmine, evidently a stray from the garden. The stone itself is thickly covered with moss, small-leaved ivy (and isn’t small-leaved ivy lovely in its colouring very often, in the early months of the year, some brown and yellow, some red and green?) and little ferns, till scarcely a trace of the grey stone can be seen, and where it does push through it is splashed with milky-green lichen. Then wandering over all is a wealth of honeysuckle that catches hold of everything impartially, and twines itself in all directions. At the base of the precipitous boulder the grass is thick and green; violets, the big purple-blue scented sort, cluster all around the corners, and hold up rich-looking blossoms; primroses laugh out in the sunshine; snowdrops dingle their bells to a delightful melody, if only our ears were more delicately tuned to catch the music; daffodils blow their own trumpets above their clumps of blue-green leaves; the ground-ivy creeps and creeps and lights up the green with its lovely blue flowers that have never received half the praise that is their due. And in a damp spot there is a mass of blue forget-me-nots, with one clump that is pure white.