“How I hate modern gardens!” said St. Aldegonde. “What a horrid thing this is! One might as well have a mosaic pavement there. Give me cabbage-roses, sweet-peas, and wall-flowers. That is my idea of a garden. Corisande’s garden is the only sensible thing of the sort.” “One likes a mosaic pavement to look like a garden,” said Euphrosyne, “but not a garden like a mosaic pavement.” “The worst of these mosaic beds,” said Madame Phoebus, “is, you can never get a nosegay, and if it were not for the kitchen-garden, we should be destitute of that gayest and sweetest of creations.” “Corisande’s garden is, since your first visit to Brentham,” said the duchess to Lothair. “No flowers are admitted that have not perfume. It is very old-fashioned. You must get her to show it you.” It was agreed that after breakfast they should go and see Corisande’s garden. And a party did go—all the Phoebus family, and Lord and Lady St. Aldegonde, and Lady Corisande, and Bertram, and Lothair. In the pleasure-grounds of Brentham were the remains of an ancient garden of the ancient house that had long ago been pulled down. When the modern pleasure-grounds were planned and created, notwithstanding the protests of the artists in landscape, the father of the present duke would not allow this ancient garden to be entirely destroyed, and you came upon its quaint appearance in the dissimilar world in which it was placed, as you might in some festival of romantic costume upon a person habited in the courtly dress of the last century. It was formed upon a gentle southern slope, with turfen terraces walled in on three sides, the fourth consisting of arches of golden yew. The duke had given this garden to Lady Corisande, in order that she might practise her theory, that flower-gardens should be sweet and luxuriant, and not hard and scentless imitations of works of art. Here, in their season, flourished abundantly all those productions of Nature which are now banished from our once delighted senses; huge bushes of honey-suckle, and bowers of sweet-pea and sweet-brier, and jessamine clustering over the walls, and gillyflowers scenting with their sweet breath the ancient bricks from which they seemed to spring. There were banks of violets which the southern breeze always stirred, and mignonette filled every vacant nook. As they entered now, it seemed a blaze of roses and carnations, though one recognized in a moment the presence of the lily, the heliotrope, and the stock. Some white peacocks were basking on the southern wall, and one of them, as their visitors entered, moved and displayed its plumage with scornful pride. The bees were busy in the air, but their homes were near, and you might watch them laboring in their glassy hives.