Gardens, in like manner, must be judged by their serviceableness in the pursuit of games, and here again we were fortunate. Adjacent to the house itself was a big lawn, levelled and sown afresh, which was the arena of cricket and rounders. Behind that was an asphalted yard with a stable, a coach-house and a woodshed, erected no doubt in order that we might play fives against them: a covered passage led to the kitchen garden. There was sufficient space here for a lawn-tennis court, the lines of which were laid down with tape secured by hairpins. Occasionally the foot caught in the tape; “zp, zp, zp,” went most of the hairpins and the shape of the court changed for the moment from an oblong to a trapezium with no right-angles. By one side of this was a steep grassy bank with elder bushes growing on the top. Here you laid yourself stiffly out on the ground, and like that rolled bodily down the bank, sitting up again at the bottom to find the world reeling and spinning round you. When you felt a little less sick, you refreshed yourself with elderberries, and rolled down again. Beyond this was a pear tree large enough to climb, and high enough not to fall out of, and an asparagus bed. The edible properties of that vegetable were of no interest, but when it went to seed and grew up in tall fern-like stems with orange berries it was valuable as a hiding-place. Narrow grass paths led this way and that between the garden beds, and they had been well constructed, for they were of such a width that it was possible, though difficult, to bowl a hoop down them without invading the cabbages. A fool would have made them either wider or narrower, and then they would have been useless. In a corner of the garden were our own particular plots, and against the red brick wall grew a fig tree, which I thought had some connection with the biblical tree that withered away, because it never yielded its fruit. All round the garden ran a high wall, now brick, now ancient limestone, and at the bottom was a mediæval tower partly in ruins, where we habitually played the most dangerous game that has ever been invented since the world began. Why no one was killed I cannot understand to this day. The game was called “Sieges,” and the manner of it was as follows: