Such a long-shaped garden is also capable of various ways of treatment as to its edge, which need not necessarily be an unbroken line. The length of the border in question is perhaps a little too great. It might be better, while keeping the effect of a quiet line, looking from end to end, to have swung the edge of the border back in a segment of a circle to a little more than half its depth, every few yards, in such a proportion as a plan to scale would show to be right; or to have treated it in some one of the many possible ways of accentuation where the cross paths occur that divide it into three lengths. The thinking out of these details according to the conditions of the site, the combining of them into designs that shall add to its beauty, and the actual working of them, the mind meanwhile picturing the effect in advance--these are some of the most interesting and enlivening of the many kinds of happiness that a garden gives. Be it large or small there is always scope for inventive ability; either for the bettering of something or for the casting of some detail into a more desirable form. Every year brings some new need; in supplying it fresh experience is gained, and with this an increasing power of adapting simple means to such ends as may be easily devised to the advancement of the garden’s beauty. BRAMHAM The gardens at Bramham in Yorkshire, laid out and built near the end of the seventeenth century, are probably the best preserved in England or the grounds that were designed at that time under French influence. Wrest in Bedfordshire, and Melbourne in Derbyshire of which some pictures will follow, are also gardens of purely French character. It is extremely interesting to compare these gardens with those of a more distinctly Italian feeling. Many features they have in common; architectural structure and ornament, close-clipped evergreen hedges inclosing groves of free-growing trees; parterres, pools and fountains. Yet the treatment was distinctly different, and, though not easy to define in words, is at once recognised by the eye. For one thing the French school, shown in its extremest form by the gardens of Versailles, dealt with much larger and more level spaces. The gardens of Italian villas, whether of the Roman Empire or of the Renaissance, were for the most part in hilly places; pleasant for summer coolness. This naturally led to much building of balustraded terraces and flights of steps, and of parterres whose width was limited to that of the level that could conveniently be obtained. Whereas in France, and in England especially, where the country house is the home for all the year, the greater number of large places have land about them that is more or less level and that can be taken in to any extent.