Adjoining the street through which I always, in my childhood, walked slowly each Sunday, on my way to and from church, was a spot to detain lingering footsteps--a beautiful garden laid out and tenanted like the gardens of colonial days, and serene with the atmosphere of a worthy old age; a garden which had been tended for over half a century by a withered old man and his wife, whose golden wedding was spent in the house they had built, and in the garden they had planted when they were bride and groom. His back was permanently bowed with constant weeding and pruning and planting and hoeing, and his hands and face were brown as the soil he cultivated. The "hot-glowing" crimson peonies, seedlings which the wife had sown in her youth, had become great shrubs, fifteen or twenty feet in circumference. The flowering shrubs were trees. Vigorous borders of box crowded across the paths and towered on either side, till one could scarcely walk through them. There were beautiful fairy groves of fox gloves "gloriously freckled, purple, and white," and tall Canterbury bells; and at stiffly regular intervals were set flowering almonds, St. Peter's wreath, Persian lilacs, "Moses in the burning bush," which shrub was rare in our town, and "laburnums rich in streaming gold, syringas ivory pure." At the lower ends of the flower borders were rows of "honey-blob" gooseberries, and aged currant bushes, gray with years, overhung by a few patriarchal quince and crab-apple trees, in whose low-spreading gnarled branches I spent many a summer afternoon, a happy visitor, though my own home garden was just as beautiful, old-fashioned, and flower-filled. The varying grades of city streets had gradually risen around the garden until it lay depressed several feet below the level of the adjoining streets, a pleasant valley,--like Avalon,-- "Deep-meadowed, happy, fair, with orchard lawns, And bowery hollows crown'd with summer seas." A flight of stone steps led down to it,--steps very steep, narrow, and slippery with green moss, and ladies'-delights that crowded and blossomed in every crack and crevice of the stones. On each side arose terraces to the street, and in the spring these terraces flushed a mass of vivid, glowing rose-color from blooming moss-pink, forming such a glory that pious church-going folk from the other end of the town did not think it wicked to walk thither, on a Sunday morn in May, to look at the rosy banks that sloped to the valleyed garden, as they had walked there in February or March to see "Winter, slumbering in the open air, Wear on his smiling face a dream of spring,"