Nature is never stiff, and none recognizes this fact better than ---- & Son, and their now well-known and natural-looking rockeries have reclaimed many a dreary bit of landscape. At ---- they showed me photographs of various country seats where the natural-looking scenery has been evolved by their artistic taste and ingenuity out of the most ordinary efforts of Nature. Thus a dull old mill-stream has, with the aid of rockeries and appropriate vegetation, been converted into a wonderfully picturesque spot, an ordinary brook was transformed into a lovely woodland scene, with ferns, mosses, and lichens growing among the rockeries, and the shores of an uninteresting lake became undulating banks of beauty by the same means; while the beautiful rockeries in ---- Park were also the work of this firm. ---- & Son have other ways, too, of beautifying gardens and grounds by the judicious use of balustrades, fountains, quaint figures, etc., made of “---- terra-cotta,” or artificial stone, which is far more durable than real stone or marble, not so costly, and impervious to frost and all weathers, although it takes the vegetation in the same way, and after a year’s exposure it can scarcely be distinguished from antique stone. In it the great _spécialité_ here just now is “sundials,” the latest craze; for without a sundial no ancient or up-to-date garden is considered complete. Nevertheless the town smells heartily of cattle, sheep, and malt; a rookery and white orchard confront the railway station, and in the midst of the streets the long grass is rough and wet and full of jonquils round ancient masonry: seen from a height the town shares the sunlight equally with massy foliage and finds its place as a part of Nature, and the peregrine takes it in its sweep. The turtle-doves have come and the oaks are budding bronze in the Weald. The steep roadside banks are cloaked in grass, violet, and primrose still, and robin-run-in-the-hedge and stitchwort and cuckoo flowers, and the white-throats talk in the hazel copses. A brooklet runs in a hollow that would almost hold the Thames, and crossing the road fills a rushy mill-pond deep below, and makes a field all golden and shining with marigold. Just beyond, a gnarled lime avenue leads to a grey many-windowed house of stone within a stately park. Opposite the gate an old woman sits on the grass, her feet in the dust at the edge of the road; motor-cars sprinkle her and turn her black to drab; she sits by the wayside eternally, expecting nothing.