7. DOG-POST-DAY. The Great Parsonage-Park.--Orangery.--Flamin's Promotion.--Festal Afternoon of Domestic Love.--Rain of Fire.--Letter to Emanuel. His Lordship excepted, all are now sitting and waiting for me in the parsonage-garden; but the garden itself not a mortal soul is yet acquainted with. It is a Chrestomathy[76] of all gardens, and yet no larger than the church. Many gardens resemble it in being at once kitchen-gardens, flower-gardens, and orchards; but it is also a _jardin des animaux_, as it contains in fact the whole Fauna of St. Luna, and a botanical garden, too; it is overgrown with the entire Flora of the village; and it is a garden of honey-bees and humble-bees also, as often as they happen to fly into it. Meanwhile such minor merits are really hardly worth naming, when a garden once has, like this, the merit of being the greatest English garden through which a man ever strode. It hides not only its end,--as every park, like every purse, must do,--but even its beginning, and seems to be merely the terrace from which one can see into that which one cannot see over, but, like Cook, may well circumnavigate. In the English parsonage-garden there are not single ruins, but whole broken-up cities, and the greatest princes have rivalled each other in their passion for furnishing it with romantic wildernesses and battle-fields and gallows-trees, to which (and that carries the illusion still higher) real rogues are tied, into the bargain, as fruit-pendants. The buildings and shrubs of different parts of the world are there, not huddled together into an absurd neighborhood, but neatly kept apart from each other by regular seas or water-scapes, which its size easily makes possible, since it contains over nine million square miles; and with what taste, in fact, these masses are brought together, the reader may estimate from the fact that all lords and all reviewers in the literary periodicals, and the readers themselves, are drawn into the garden and often stay therein sixty years.--