These chapters are simply an attempt to record the gist of some conversations and noonday thoughts, which have arisen from time to time in idle moments spent in a garden on the Cotswold Hills, where there are gathered together certain features unusual in Western pleasances. Our thoughts are largely the creations of our surroundings, and when at every step I am met by some work of art or a plant which has travelled perhaps twelve thousand miles to bring me a greeting from afar, then I, too, begin to travel and am carried away beyond the seas. If here and there I think and talk of things nearer home, my thoughts are still those of a wanderer—still those which are suggested by the mysterious thrilling of one of those chords for which there is nothing to account, but which never vibrate as they do in my Veluvana, the bamboo grove of Buddha, which thus becomes a temple dedicated to Mnemosyne. One thing I wish to disclaim. I am often told that people believe that I have a Japanese garden. I have nothing of the kind. A Japanese garden is a mystery hard to be understood; it is a work of art depending upon certain fixed laws and canons prescribed, many centuries ago, by a school of Aesthetes, whose lives were spent in the punctilious observance of the rules prescribed for tea-drinking and incense-burning and the writing of sonnets, in grounds laid out upon principles, of which the slightest violation would be an outrage upon the decencies of culture. In such gardens flowers play but a small part, but the shapes, the position and the orientation of quaint rocks, the introduction of miniature lakes, and even of the similitude of rivers carried out in sand or gravel, with stepping stones by which they may be crossed without disturbing the smooth surface, these and many other whims are the important but sober and yet fantastic features upon which the Japanese landscape gardener insists. Trees and flowering shrubs—such as cherries and plums—lianes like the Wistaria and the ornamental vines, are used with the utmost discretion, as they are with us. But the introduction of alien plants, the exhibition of bronze ornaments and lanterns, or the naturalistic arrangement of rockwork with a streamlet crossed by lacquered bridges, no more give a garden the claim to be called Japanese than the possession of a piece of old Greek sculpture would liken a house to the Acropolis of Athens, or than skill in the pretty and very difficult game of kicking shuttlecocks with the heel would entitle a Pekingese boy to claim kinship with a Rugby football player.