* Since this paper was first written, the summer-house, the garden, and the 'Guinea Orchard'--a strip of field which came between Cowper's garden and that of the Parsonage--have been sold by auction, the purchaser being a local butcher. The sale took place in February, 1896. But of another favourite haunt of Cowper, which preceded and co-existed with it, there are now no traces. This was the greenhouse.= ```''T is a bower of Arcadian sweets, ````Where Flora is still in her prime, ```A fortress to which she retreats ````From the cruel assaults of the clime'--= he writes in his favourite rocking-horse metre, and most conventional language, bidding his Mary remark the beauty of the pinks which it has preserved through the frosts; and in mid-July, when the floor was carpeted, and the sun was excluded by an awning of mats, it became 'the pleasantest retreat in Olney.' 'We eat, drink, and sleep, where we always did,' he says to Newton; 'but here we spend all the rest of our time, and find that the sound of the wind in the trees, and the singing of birds, are much more agreeable to our ears than the incessant barking of dogs and screaming of children,' from both of which, it may be observed, they suffered considerably in the front of the house. Two years later he tells Mr. Unwin that 'our severest winter, commonly called the spring, is now over, and I find myself seated in my favourite recess, the greenhouse. In such a situation, so silent, so shady, where no human foot is heard, and where only my myrtles presume to peep in at the window, you may suppose I have no interruption to complain of, and that my thoughts are perfectly at my command. But the beauties of the spot are themselves an interruption, my attention being called upon by those very myrtles, by a double row of grass pinks, just beginning to blossom, and by a bed of beans already in bloom; and you are to consider it, if you please, as no small proof of my regard, that, though you have so many powerful rivals, I disengage myself from them all, and devote this hour entirely to you.'