Box has been put to quite another use in the Pope’s private gardens at the Vatican. They have a gigantic Cardinal’s Hat, with all its cords and tassels, edged with box and filled with brilliant flowers. I have seen it only in the autumn, when the flowers are going off; but in the early summer it must be magnificent. In this neighbourhood a great deal of box-edging has been destroyed in recent years, the pretext being that it harbours slugs, and they eat up all the flowers in the beds. But slugs seldom eat begonias; and begonias look very gorgeous against the dark green of the box. I have used them most successfully these last fifteen years. Most of the old houses here have groups of box-edged beds with narrow paths between them, making up some pattern as a whole. And these are known as Pixey Gardens. As pixies are twelve inches high, these little paths are pretty much the same to them as Devonshire lanes to human beings. I was taught that one could always tell a pixey from a fairy, as fairies wear clothes, and pixies go without; but I have never seen either sort myself, in a pixey garden or elsewhere. A very cautious old lady once remarked to me that she had never seen any pixies herself, but she knew so many people who said they had seen pixies, that she would not undertake to say that there were no such things. This puts the pixies in pretty much the same position as the Russian soldiers who passed through England at the beginning of the War. There was formerly a draw-well in front of the house, and its site is marked by the second of the round beds in the Pixey Garden. I imagine that the garden was not made until the well had been filled in, and that this was not till 1839, when the present well was sunk; but I do not know for certain. The garden was rectangular till 1899; and then I added the semi-circular end, and made a gateway through the orchard hedge, carrying the main path round the semi-circle to the gateway. In altering the path, a dog’s skeleton was found at the foot of the espalier pear tree. There is a dog in the full-length portrait of my grandfather’s grandfather, and there is the same dog in the picture of the family in 1787; and somebody suggested that this might be the dog, whose grave we had disturbed. The skeleton had crumbled, but the skull was sound; and I showed it to various people, who were fond of dogs, and thought they understood them. Some thought it might be that dog’s skull, while others thought the dog was of another breed. At last, I got an introduction to a high authority at the Natural History Museum at South Kensington, and I showed him the skull and photographs of both the pictures. I became aware that he was staring at me in amazement, and at last he gasped:--“But it isn’t a dog at all. It’s a badger.”