If we opened the garden door we entered a verdant wilderness of paths crossing one another; and each was (and there lay the charm) in itself a solitude. Country lanes may break the grand lines of a landscape; but, in the neighbourhood of a great and crowded city, every glimpse of nature is pleasant and lovely. I remember the sense of serene happiness I felt in walking out with Kate in the early morning, along a quiet path; now, alas! crowded with villas, but then called "Nightingale lane," and sheltered on one side by a cheerful orchard, with its white and fragrant blossoms in Spring, or its bending fruit in Autumn, glittering in the rising sun; and, on the other, screened by a row of elms, whose ancient roots grasped earth in the tenacious hold of ages, and whose broad base young green shoots veiled with a tender grace. The horizon on our left was bounded by an old park, a stately, motionless grove of beech-trees, above which, bending to every breeze, rose a few tall and graceful poplars; to our right, hidden in its garden, lay our humble home. Kate, reading her favourite Thomas ? Kempis, walked on, her eyes bent on the page; I followed more slowly, reading, child though I was, from the Divine book man cannot improve, and vainly tries to mar. Between the path and the hedge which enclosed the orchard, lay a broad ditch. There grew green grasses, that bent to the breeze like forests, and beneath which flowed a faint thread of water, the river of that small world, peopled with nations of insects, and which to me possessed both attraction and beauty. For there the ground-ivy trailed along the earth, its delicate blue flowers hidden by fresh leaves; there rose the purple bugle, the stately dead-nettle, with its broad leaves and white whorls, and grew the cheerful celandine, bright buttercups, the sunny dandelion, the diminutive shepherd's purse, the starry blossoms of the chickweed, the dark bitter-sweet with its poisonous red berries, the frail and transparent flowers of the bindweed, sheltered in the prickly hedge like shy or captive beauties, with every other common weed and plant which man despises, and God disdained not to fashion.