They were simple flowers we sought to cultivate in those days, simple flowers with beautiful names. Violets and snowdrops, the reticent but cheerful pansy, otherwise known as “three faces under a hood,” love-lies-bleeding, wallflowers, stocks, and London pride, or “none so pretty”; of these and their unaffected comrades we made our gardens. Spades and pickaxes were denied us, but the simple gardening tools were ours, and he has lived in darkness who has not experienced the keen joy of smacking the earth with the convex side of a trowel. My hands tingle when I remember how sore weeding made the finger-tips, and there is something in the last ecstatic chuckle of a watering-pot as it runs dry that lingers in the ear. I am aware that there are persons of mature years who can find pleasure in the performance of simple garden tasks. But I am afraid that subconsciously it is the æsthetic aspect of flowers that attracts them, and that their gardening is only a means to an end. No such charge could be brought against our efforts. We cared little about flowers or results of any sort; we only wanted to garden, and it troubled us not at all that the labours of one day destroyed those of the day before. To dig a deep hole and to fill it with water when completed is, as far as I have observed, no part of the ordinary gardener’s daily work, but it was our favourite effort, and a share in the construction of these ornamental waters was the greatest favour that we could grant to a friend. There were always captivating insects with numerous and casual legs to be discovered in the digging, and great stones that parted from the earth as reluctantly as nuggets. And when we had hollowed a cup in the earth we would pour in the sea and set our hearts floating upon its surface in paper ships. The sides of the hole would crumble down into the water like real cliffs, and every little fall would send a real wave sparkling across the surface of the ocean. Then there were bays to be cut and canals, and soundings to be taken with pieces of knotted string weighted with stones. Water has been the friend of children ever since Moses floated in his little ark of rushes to the feet of Pharaoh’s daughter. I question whether they know very much about this sort of gardening at Kew, a place which is, however, beloved of children for the sake of the excellent spiral staircases in the palm-houses. But every sensible child has the art at its finger-tips, and in the time that we take to reach Brighton in a fleet motor they will construct a brand new sea for themselves—a sea with harbours and islands and sunken reefs, a perfect sea of wonder and romance.