The whole panorama of the seasons passed in colour and shape before his inward eye, running at the same time through his brain like a well-known piece of music. Familiar as it was, however, it was also highly intricate, with its many different parts overlapping and intertwining. Not only was there the kitchen garden to think of, but there were the glass-houses as well, fruit grown inside and out, tomatoes, orchids, carnations, violets. Then down at the Hall there were the rose-gardens and lawns, tennis-courts and flower-borders, and the long yew and beech-hedges to be kept trim and close. And besides all these there was the big rock-garden across the river, full of plants which, however much you might suppress them, grew as giants grow in a single night. He saw the vegetables he would grow with the warm, homely thrill with which the farmer sees his crops, and the housewife her stores of linen and jam. The fruit he saw as an artist sees his finished task,--as gleaming jewels of price which you can hold and weigh in your hand. But the flowers he saw as the mystic and the dreamer see Heaven,--not in concrete form, but as sheer colour and light, and an ecstasy of shaded tones. He had, too, the knowledge which enabled him to see under the soil, as the geologist sees the strata under his feet, and the drainer sees where the streams run under the apparently dry surface. Beneath the quiet beds and the still grass he saw the forces of life already waking to work, sending the spring-urge through the seeds which had slept there during the winter, or conserving their energies for those which should be given into their charge later. But for that insight and knowledge there would have seemed little enough encouragement from the brown waste lying before him, and curving away behind potting-sheds and glass to come back to him again along empty borders. The gardens were not actually empty, of course, for there were evergreen climbers and shrubs, patches of colour made by the remains of the winter greens, jasmine in flower, and the wing-like flashes of snowdrops and crocuses. But by comparison with his vision it was altogether desolate and barren, for in that he saw all the miracle of each season at once, smiled upon by a cloudless heaven.