When the young hermit had finished his hut, and succeeded in furnishing it with a few coarse household utensils, framed chiefly by his own hands, he began to form a garden. In the cultivation and adornment of this spot, he displayed a degree of natural taste and ingenuity that might have fitted him for a higher fate than the seclusion of a hermitage. In a short time he had stocked it with such a profusion of fruit-trees, herbs, vegetables, and flowers, that it seemed a little forest of beauty—a shred of Eden, fit to redeem the wilderness around from its character of desolation—a gem on the swarth brow of the desert. Not only did it exhibit the finest specimens of flowers indigenous to this country, but he had also contrived to procure a number of exotics, whose Linnæan names he would roll forth to the friends whom he indulged with an admission within its precincts, with a pomposity of voice that never failed to enhance their admiration. It soon came to be much resorted to by visitors, being accounted, with _the genius of the place_, one of the most remarkable curiosities of the county. Dr. Ferguson used sometimes to visit the eccentric solitary, as an amusement in that retired spot; and Sir Walter Scott, who was a frequent guest at the house of that venerable gentleman, is said to have often held long communings with him; likewise several other individuals of literary celebrity. There is something more peculiarly romantic and poetical in the circumstance of the Misanthrope’s attachment to his garden than can be found in any of the other habits and qualities attributed to him. The care of that beautiful spot was his chief occupation, and may be said to have been the only pleasure his life was ever permitted to experience. On it alone he could employ that _faculty_ of affection with which every heart, even that of the cynic, is endowed. Shut out from the correspondence and sympathy of his own fellow-creatures by the insurmountable pale of his own ugliness, there existed, in the whole circle of nature, no other object that could receive his affections, or reply to the feelings he had to impart. In flowers alone, those lineal and undegenerate descendants of Paradise, the Solitary found an object of attachment that could do equal honour to his feelings and to his taste. His garden was a perfect seraglio of vegetable beauties, and _there_ he could commune with a thousand objects of affection, that never shrunk from the touch which threatened horror and pollution to all the world beside.