all, when he wept in the woods before dawn and cried: “Great man-bodied tree, That mine arms in the dark are embracing, What magic of sympathy lies Between dear over-beautiful trees and the rain of the eyes?” It was in the Villa Borghese, driving round and round during the balmy afternoons of the spring before I was married, that my mother and I read William Morris’s “Jason” aloud to each other, and never did a perfect poem have a more perfect setting. Where the lie of the land mounts a little towards the Pincio side of the Borghese, four avenues converge on a circle, in the centre of which is one of those broad lake fountains only to be seen in Rome, marble-rimmed and guarded by a group of marble sea-horses rearing and pawing round the tall shaft of water that bursts up from their midst. The carriage way is broad around the fountain, for here all the vehicles must pass, and the Roman world of my day prided itself on its shining equipages and thoroughbred horses. But all its pomp and brilliancy pales, at a certain moment of the spring, before the pink forest of juniper trees that thrust their thick-set branches out, from the darker foliage behind, to smother the marble seats below them in one enormous wreath of rose-coloured bloom, a carnival of loveliness only to be matched by the cherry blossoms in Japan. Here we used to leave the carriage and make our way into the vast enclosures of meadow under the stone-pines, where the wild anemone hid all the grass under a mantle of vivid pink. The Borghese anemone was a real wild thing, very like the English wind-flower that shimmers all along the landslip and the undercliff where the spring tides are flinging the Channel surf in thunder against the cliffs of the Isle of Wight. Only the English wind-flower is pale and fragile, white or lavender for choice, and the Roman one is of a flaunting purple-pink, with a strong stem the colour of brown madder—as is fitting for a self-respecting flower sprung from a soil that has been steeped in sun and soaked in blood. And it has this peculiarity, unique, so far as I know, among wild flowers, that if you bring it home, in handfuls, as we used to do, and set it in water overnight, it will have grown many inches by the morning, every stalk stiff and proud, as if saying: “You thought I belonged in the fields, didn’t you? No, indeed, _my_ place is in a palace!”