The gardens were as other gardens, but passing beautiful. The sloping
lawns and richly-timbered banks, winding shrubberies, broad terraces cut
on the side of the hill, gave infinite variety. All that wealth and
taste and labour could do to make those grounds beautiful had been
done--the rarest conifers, the loveliest flowering shrubs grew and
flourished there, and the flowers bloomed as they bloom only in
Lakeland, where every cottage garden can show a wealth of luxurious
bloom, unknown in more exposed and arid districts. Mary was very proud
of those gardens. She had loved them and worked in them from her
babyhood, trotting about on chubby legs after some chosen old gardener,
carrying a few weeds or withered leaves in her pinafore, and fancying
herself useful.
'I help 'oo, doesn't I, Teeven?' she used to say to the gray-headed old
gardener, who first taught her to distinguish flowers from weeds.
'I shall never learn as much out of these horrid books as poor old
Stevens taught me,' she said afterwards, when the gray head was at rest
under the sod, and governesses, botany manuals, and hard words from the
Greek were the order of the day.
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