Mr. Hillary’s place lay in a sheltered bend of the river, nearer to Isleworth than to Twickenham--a spot where the trees grew thicker and the shadows fell darker on the quiet water, and the plash of oars was less often heard, than higher up the river, Mr. Hillary’s house and Mr. Hillary’s garden seemed to have nestled into the shadiest and most verdant nook along the river-bank. It was called the Cedars, and it was a very old place, as any place so called should be. It was called the Cedars by virtue of the great trees whose spreading branches made patches of dense shadow on the lawn; and not by the caprice of a cockney builder, who christens his shelterless houses indifferently after the noblest trees of the forest. The house was an old red-brick mansion, long and low and irregular; and there is no kind of window invented for the admission of the light of heaven, and there is no species of blind devised by ingenious artisan for the exclusion of that light when it becomes obnoxious, which did not adorn and diversify the glowing crimson of the façade. Oriel windows and Tudor windows; long French windows of violet-stained glass, tiny diamond-paned casements, and noble jutting-out bays; windows with balconies, and windows with verandahs; striped linen blinds of crimson and white, and Venetian shutters of dazzling green; windows leading into conservatories, and windows opening into aviaries,--all combined to bewilder the eye of the stranger who stood upon the lawn by the river looking up at Mr. Hillary’s mansion. Perhaps there never had been any where else so many flowers, and birds, and gold-fish, and pet dogs, collected together in an area of two acres and a half. Banks of particoloured blossoms blazed in the sunshine on the lawn tier above tier, like the bonnets on the grand stand at Ascot on a Cup day; marble basins of limpid water and tiny trickling fountains twinkled and glittered in every direction; fragile colonnades of delicate ironwork, overhung with jasmine and clematis, honeysuckle and myrtle-blossom, led away to bowery nooks upon the broad terrace by the river; and what with the perfume of a million flowers, the gurgling of blackbirds and thrushes, the carolling of skylarks, the shrill whistling of a grove of canaries, the cooing of tropical love-birds, the screaming of paroquets, and the barking of half-a-dozen excited lapdogs, the stranger, suddenly let loose in Mr. Hillary’s river-side Eden, was apt to yield himself up for the moment to a state of confusion and bewilderment.