The fine garden gave special pleasure to Lepsius. After he had had tea at his writing table he always took a walk there, in winter as well as in summer, and whether the weather was good or bad. He felt a “special interest in it, and knew it all by heart.” The trees which soon overshadowed it had been planted on various happy occasions by dear guests and friends of the household, in memory of the delightful hours which they had passed under the roof of Lepsius, and as a visible symbol and token of the friendship which burgeoned and blossomed anew with each year. Alexander von Humboldt, Bunsen, the Grimms, Ehrenberg, E. Curtius and many others had planted their trees, and on each was a little tablet which bore the name of him who had set it in the earth. Foreign friends too, who could not come to Berlin and attend to the planting themselves, sent small trees to be set out. For example, the Director of the museum at Leyden, already mentioned several times, (see pages 123 and 245) sent a variety of _Betula_ which had been named after him _Betula Lemansiana_, by a nursery gardener at Warmond. As the trees which he first sent did not arrive he despatched others, and these throve and long reminded the Lepsius family of their Dutch friend. The garden was a living and shady temple of friendship, and what beautiful festivals were celebrated there! Plays and spectacular performances were often given in the fine spacious apartments of this house on the birthday of the head of the family, which occurred shortly before Christmas. They were distinguished by the same thoughtful intelligence which had given rise to the tree-planting and laid the corner stone under the living-room of the mistress of the house. The ideas were usually furnished by Frau Elizabeth. Thus a fable was once represented, interspersed with _tableaux vivants_, which the children and their little friends undertook to produce. The subject was the standard alphabet (see page 104) of their father, which was personified as Miss Alphabeta Standarda, and represented in the different stages of its development. The dialogue was both sprightly and well written, in the best style of fable, and seasoned with many merry and satirical allusions. At one time there were _tableaux vivants_ after antique personages and the pictures of Flaxman, and then again the trees from the garden made their appearance. Before this, the treasure-house of Rhampsinitus had been represented according to Platen. Similar performances, always original, thoughtful, and excellently executed in detail, delighted the guests, the children who usually had to take part in them, and especially the host himself. When a ball was given, too, they never failed to have particularly pretty and original cotillion figures, for which the poet and faithful friend of the family, Abeken, composed the verses.