gardens, sloped down
to the water. I afterwards understood that the father of the present
proprietor had a considerable taste for horticulture, which had been
inherited by his son, and had formed these gardens, which, with their
shaven turf, pleached alleys, wildernesses, and exotic trees and shrubs,
greatly excelled anything of the kind which had been attempted in the
neighbourhood.

If there was a little vanity in the complacent smile with which Joshua
Geddes saw me gaze with delight on a scene so different from the naked
waste we had that day traversed in company, it might surely be permitted
to one who, cultivating and improving the beauties of nature, had found
therein, as he said, bodily health, and a pleasing relaxation for the
mind. At the bottom of the extended gardens the brook wheeled round in a
wide semicircle, and was itself their boundary. The opposite side was
no part of Joshua's domain, but the brook was there skirted by a
precipitous rock of limestone, which seemed a barrier of nature's own
erecting around his little Eden of beauty, comfort, and peace.

'But I must not let thee forget,' said the kind Quaker, 'amidst thy
admiration of these beauties of our little inheritance, that thy
breakfast has been a light one.'

So saying, Joshua conducted me to a small sashed door, opening under
a porch amply mantled by honeysuckle and clematis, into a parlour
of moderate size; the furniture of which, in plainness and excessive
cleanliness, bore the characteristic marks of the sect to which the
owner belonged.

Thy father's Hannah is generally allowed to be an exception to all
Scottish housekeepers, and stands unparalleled for cleanliness among
the women of Auld Reekie; but the cleanliness of Hannah is sluttishness
compared to the scrupulous purifications of these people, who seem to
carry into the minor decencies of life that conscientious rigour which
they affect in their morals.

The parlour would have been gloomy, for the windows were small and the
ceiling low; but the present proprietor had rendered it more cheerful
by opening one end into a small conservatory, roofed with glass, and
divided from the parlour by a partition of the same. I have never before
seen this very pleasing manner of uniting the comforts of an apartment
with the beauties of a garden, and I wonder it is not more practised
by the great. Something of the kind is hinted at in a paper of the
SPECTATOR.

As I walked towards the conser