Italian gardens, though generally planned to give one imposing spectacle of some kind, with great wealth of statues and marble balustrades and elaborate formations or quiet stretches of water, are rich in small sequestered courts of flowers and greenery; the people who seem to have cared least for privacy in their houses took pains to make many solitudes in their gardens. Doubtless the desire for shade from summer heats had much to do with the intricate—apartments, one might almost call them—which diversify the villas and cut off spot after spot in an absolute seclusion of high box walls and over-arching trees, entered only by one small opening somewhere in the otherwise impenetrable hedge. And, incidentally, the screened shelter thus afforded has fostered the growth and all-winter blooming of more delicate flowers and shrubs than could have survived the sudden attacks of the “tramontana,” in the open. The “Giardino Colonna” was full of charming surprises of the kind one remembers gratefully in the more arid stretches of life. One particular morning there remains very clearly imprinted on my memory, a morning of June, when I was running about with my small half-brother and sister, feeling very much their age. I had lost sight of them for a moment, and in seeking for them broke into an enclosure I had not seen before. Two or three tiny terraces, bordered with old bas-reliefs, lay just touched by the first rays of the sun; a delicate mimosa tree, very feathery and fragile, stood within reach of the spray of a fountain that sent a shaft of diamonds high into the air; all around was a tangle of Banksia roses and white lilies, and an ancient sarcophagus of honey-coloured marble on the top terrace, overflowing with ferns, looked like a golden casket in the low sunbeams. Every branch and leaf and petal was pearled with dew and spray, and the fragrance of the flowers in that miraculous freshness of the morning was almost too sweet for mortal senses to hear. It is so funny to see some of our brilliant decadents in art and literature trying to embody their ideas of the “_joie de vivre_” in pictures of wild debauch, in mad dances of painted girls and drunken youths, in reproductions of the entertainments invented to stimulate the senses of the old Romans and Egyptians—people already half dead with satiety and incapable of experiencing a single thrill of healthy pleasure. Five minutes of existence, given a young heart in a young body, on a summer dawn amid the flowers, outtops their crude imaginings of the joy of life as completely as the rising sunbeams outshine our poor artificial lights.