brilliant, in the fine, peaty soil and pure air. The scent of the mignonette, which in this late season straggled anywhere, seemed to fill half the country round. The borders were crowned with those autumn flowers which make up as well as they can for their want of sweetness by lavish wealth of colour--the glowing single dahlias, which this generation has had the good sense to re-capture from Nature after the quilled and rosetted artificial things which the gardeners had manufactured out of them, and the fine scarlet and blue of the salvias, and the glory of all those golden tribes of the daisy kind that now make our borders bright, instead of the old sturdy red geranium, which once sufficed for all the supplies of autumn, an honest servant but a poor lord. I prefer the sweetness of the Spring, when every flower has a soul in it, and breathes it all about in the air, that is full of hope. But as it cannot always be Spring, that triumph of bright hues is something to mask the face of winter with until the time when the tortured and fantastic chrysanthemum reigns alone. This was the sort of garden they had at Kingswarden; not shut off in a place by itself, but bordering all the lawns, which were of the velvet it takes centuries to perfect. The immediate grounds sloped a little to the south, and beyond them was a very extensive, if somewhat flat, prospect, ending on the horizon in certain mild blue shadows which were believed to be hills. There was not much that could be called a park at Kingswarden. The few farms which Colonel Kingsward possessed pressed his little circle of trees rather close; but as long as the farms were let the family felt they could bear this. It gave them a comfortable feeling of modest natural wealth and company; the yeomen keeping the squire warm, they in their farmsteadings, he in the hall.