of fragrance
is a striking illustration both of the littleness of the earth and the
social remoteness of its inhabitants.

Father says that Mrs. Marchant was always a very intellectual woman, and
he remembers that in the old days she had almost a passion for fragrant
flowers, and once wrote an essay upon the psychology of perfumes that
attracted some attention in the medical journal in which it was
published by her husband. That the perfume of flowers should now have
drawn the shattered fragments of her mind together for their comfort and
given her the foretaste of immortality, by the sign of the consciousness
of personal presence and peace, is beautiful indeed.

Your declaration that henceforth one garden is not enough for your
ambition, but that you crave several, amuses me greatly. For a mere
novice I must say that you are making strides in seven-league
horticultural boots, wherein you have arrived at the heart of the
matter, viz.:--one may grow many beautiful and satisfactory flowers in a
mixed garden such as falls to the lot of the average woman sufficiently
lucky to own a garden at all, but to develop the best possibilities of
any one family, like the rose, carnation, or lily, that is a bit
whimsical about food and lodging, each one must have a garden of its
own, so to speak, which, for the amateur, may be made to read as a
special bed in a special location, and not necessarily a vast area.

This need is always recognized in the English garden books, and the
chapter headings, The Rose Garden,--Hardy Garden,--Wall Garden,--Lily
Garden,--Alpine Garden, etc., lead one at first sight to think that it
is a great estate alone that can be so treated; but it is merely a
horticultural protest, born of long experience, against mixing races to
their mutual hurt, and this precaution, together with the climate, makes
of all England a gardener's paradise!

What you say of the expansiveness of the list of fragrant flowers and
leaves is also true, for taken in the literal sense there are really few
plants without an individual odour of some sort in bark, leaf, or flower
usually sufficient to identify them. In a recent book giving what
purports to be a list of fragrant flowers and leaves, the chrysanthemum
is included, as it gives out an aromatic perfume from its leaves! This
is true, but so also does the garden marigold, and yet we should not
include either among fragrant leaves in the real sense.

Hence to make the right s