No doubt many of the yews have taken forms other than those that were originally designed; the variety of shape would be otherwise too daring; but these recklessly defiant escapes from rule only add to the charm of the place, presenting a fresh surprise at every turn. The play of light and variety of colour of the green surfaces of the clipped evergreens is a delight to the trained colour-eye. Sometimes in shadow, cold, almost blue, reflecting the sky, with a sunlit edge of surprising brilliancy of golden-green--often all bright gold-green when the young shoots are coming, or when the sunlight catches the surface in one of its many wonderful ways. For the trees, clipped in so many diversities of form, offer numberless planes and facets and angles to the light, whose play upon them is infinitely varied. Then the beholder, passing on and looking back, sees the whole thing coloured and lighted anew. This quantity of Yew and Box clipped into an endless variety of fantastic forms has often been criticised as childish. Would that all gardens were childish in so happy a way! Is not the joy and perfectly innocent delight that the true lover of flowers feels in a good garden in itself akin to childishness, and is not a fine old English garden such as this, with its numberless incidents that stir and gratify the imagination, and its abundance of sweet and beautiful flowers, just the one that can give that happiness in the greatest degree? Does not the oldest of our legends, so closely bound up with our youngest apprehension of religious teaching, tell us of the earliest of our race of whom we have any record or even tradition, living happily in a garden in a state of childish innocence? Why should a garden not be childish?--perhaps when it truly deserves such a term it is the highest praise it could possibly have! However this may be the fact remains that those who own this garden of many wonders, and watch and tend it with unceasing love and reverence, and others who have had the happiness of working in it for many days together, find it a place that never wearies, but only continues day by day to disclose new beauties and new delights. Doubtless it is a garden that cannot be fairly judged from a hasty glance or a few hours’ visit. Like many of the places and things that we call inanimate--though to one who knows and loves a garden nothing is more vitally living--such a place has its moods and can frown upon an unsympathetic beholder. The garden is filled with many Roses and well-grown hardy plants; [Illustration: LEVENS: ROSES AND PINKS FROM THE PICTURE IN THE POSSESSION OF MRS. ARCHIBALD PARKER]