But the garden! oh, the garden was a miracle of beauty! and only Crispin, who deals in such lovelinesses, could describe its perfections, as he did indeed long afterwards, when the good Rector was dead, and could not read the glowing verse which eulogized his roses. Three moderately high brick walls, one running parallel to the high road, so that the Rector could keep a vigilant eye on the incomings and outgoings of his villagers, fenced in this modern garden of Alcinous, and these three walls were almost hidden by the foliage of peach and apricot and nectarine, for it was now midsummer, and nature was decked out in her gayest robes. A dial in the middle of the smooth lawn, with its warning motto, which the Rector did not believe, as Time only sauntered with him; a noble elm, wherein the thrush fluted daily, and a bower of greenery, in which the nightingale piped nightly: it was truly an ideal retreat, rendered still more perfect by the roses. The roses! oh, the red, white, and yellow roses! how they bloomed in profusion under the old red wall, which drew the heat of the sun into its breast, and then showered it second-hand on the delicate, warmth-loving flowers. Great creamy buds, trembling amid their green leaves at the caress of the wind, gorgeously crimson blossoms burning incense to the hot sun, pale-tinted flowers, which flushed delicately at the dawn hour, and bright yellow orbs, which looked as though the touch of Midas had turned them into gold. All the bees for miles around knew that garden, and the finest honey in the neighborhood owed its existence to the constant visits they paid to that wilderness of sweets. Such a bright morning as it was! Above, the blue sky, in which the sun burned lustily, below, the green earth, pranked with flowers, and between these two splendors, the Rector, armed with a pair of scissors, strolling contentedly about his small domain. From the adjacent fields, where the corn was yet young, sprang a brown-feathered lark, which arose higher and higher in spiral circles, singing as though his throat would burst with melody, until, the highest point attained, he ceased his liquid warblings, and fell earthward like a stone. Indeed, the Rector had no lack of music, for the larks awoke him in the morning, the thrushes piped to him at noon, and when night fell the divine nightingale pouring forth her impassioned strains wooed him from his study, where he was reading the Aristophanic rendering of her song, to listen to the reality, before which even the magical Greek verse seemed harsh. ’Twas an ideal place, and in it the Rector lived an ideal existence, far away from the noise and restlessness of our modern civilization. In his study he had the books of genius, which he greatly loved, but in his garden he possessed the book of God, which he loved still more; and even had not he been a devout believer in the goodness of the Almighty, surely that garden would have converted him with its dewy splendors.