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Ene; Prize DMON ?T «SEC T:LON The wide stretches of velvety grass are shaded with fruit and mimosa trees, and interspersed with flower-beds, so long and wide that you wonder how enough flowers to fill them are ever planted. Fortunately, however, very little planting is now necessary, for, in between the crepe myrtles and lilacs, flowering shrubs and roses, the transient flowers sow their own seeds with the assistance of the wind, and come up every spring with no less grace because planted “by an Unseen Hand.’’ ‘They represent, surely, those ‘‘flowery beds of ease” spoken of in the old hymn. If the garden-viewer has spent her youth in the mountains, as I have, and then had to live away from them, she will only vaguely realize the garden at first, because she will have to sit down in the summer-house and not merely look at the mountains, but let the sight of them sink into her soul until she is satisfied. For the view is the great feature which individualizes this garden, and makes tt the most beautiful of all others, and the most beloved by me. In the tropical garden, described in ““The Garden of Allah," the beholders looked out over the wall at a marvelous view of the desert, and neither the flowers nor Larbi’s flute could lure them away from it. There is no wall to the Bloomfield garden, and the hedge is low on this side; the adjoining country spreads out kindly below in rolling hills and homesteads, the latter only recognizable by position, for that miniature cluster of trees, with the big gable peeping out, is the stately Spring Hill—where my grandmother's grandfather lived when Bloomfield was built. Above, the Blue Ridge range, extending from one side of the horizon to the other, with its huge ragged outline against the sky, is a sight to leave one breathless. The dim-blue mountains lie in the distance, the slate-colored and soft-greys nearer, while the few in the foreground are a shaggy dark-green; white clouds floating over them make shadows in strange shapes. A winding trail of smoke—but, no! it is all too dreamily delicious to describe! Words only wn-naturalize a beautiful impression. Unlike most old places, whose gardens were in their prime [277]
