The garden of Châteaubrun had formerly been on a vast and magnificent scale like the rest of the domain; but a large part of it had been sold with the park, now transformed into a grain-field, and only a few acres remained. The part nearest the château was lovely in the natural disorder of its vegetation; the grass and the ornamental trees, left undisturbed in their vagabond growth, revealed here and there a step or two and a few fragments of wall, which had been summer-houses and labyrinths in the days of Louis XV. There, doubtless, mythological statues, urns, fountains and so-called rustic pavilions had repeated on a small scale the dainty and affected ornamentation of the royal palaces. But now it was all shapeless débris, covered with vines and ivy, lovelier perhaps in the eyes of an artist or a poet than it had been in the time of its magnificence. On a higher level, surrounded with a thorn-hedge to confine the two goats that grazed at will in the former garden, was the orchard, filled with venerable trees, whose gnarled and knotty branches, escaping from the constraint of the pruning-knife and the espalier, assumed odd and fantastic shapes. There was a curious interlacing of monstrous hydras and dragons writhing under foot and over head, so that it was difficult to walk there without tripping over huge roots or leaving one's hat among the branches. "These are old servants of the family," said Monsieur Antoine, breaking out a path for Emile through these patriarchs of the orchard; "they bear only once in five or six years; but then, such magnificent, juicy fruit comes from that rich, but sluggish sap! When I repurchased _my estate_, everybody advised me to cut down these old stumps; my daughter pleaded for them because of their great beauty, and it was a good thing that I followed her advice, for they give a fine shade, and although some of them yield mighty little in a year, we are sufficiently supplied with fruit. See this huge apple-tree! It must have been here when my father was born, and I'll wager that it will live to see my grand-children. Wouldn't it be downright murder to cut down such a patriarch? There's a quince-tree that bears only about a dozen quinces a year. That's very few for its size; but they're as big as my head and as yellow as pure gold; and such a flavor, monsieur! You'll see them in the fall! See, here's a cherry-tree that has a very good crop. Yes, the old fellows are still good for something, don't you think? It's only a matter of knowing how to prune them properly. A theoretical horticulturist would tell you that you must stop all this development of branches, clip and prune, so as to force the sap to transform itself into buds. But when a man is old himself, his own experience tells him something different. When the fruit tree has lived fifty years with everything sacrificed to increase its bearing qualities, you must give it its liberty and hand it over for a few years to the care of nature.