they were
bride and groom. His back was permanently bowed with constant weeding
and pruning and planting and hoeing, and his hands and face were brown
as the soil he cultivated. The "hot-glowing" crimson peonies, seedlings
which the wife had sown in her youth, had become great shrubs, fifteen
or twenty feet in circumference. The flowering shrubs were trees.
Vigorous borders of box crowded across the paths and towered on either
side, till one could scarcely walk through them. There were beautiful
fairy groves of fox gloves "gloriously freckled, purple, and white," and
tall Canterbury bells; and at stiffly regular intervals were set
flowering almonds, St. Peter's wreath, Persian lilacs, "Moses in the
burning bush," which shrub was rare in our town, and "laburnums rich in
streaming gold, syringas ivory pure." At the lower ends of the flower
borders were rows of "honey-blob" gooseberries, and aged currant bushes,
gray with years, overhung by a few patriarchal quince and crab-apple
trees, in whose low-spreading gnarled branches I spent many a summer
afternoon, a happy visitor, though my own home garden was just as
beautiful, old-fashioned, and flower-filled.

The varying grades of city streets had gradually risen around the garden
until it lay depressed several feet below the level of the adjoining
streets, a pleasant valley,--like Avalon,--

"Deep-meadowed, happy, fair, with orchard lawns,
And bowery hollows crown'd with summer seas."

A flight of stone steps led down to it,--steps very steep, narrow, and
slippery with green moss, and ladies'-delights that crowded and
blossomed in every crack and crevice of the stones. On each side arose
terraces to the street, and in the spring these terraces flushed a mass
of vivid, glowing rose-color from blooming moss-pink, forming such a
glory that pious church-going folk from the other end of the town did
not think it wicked to walk thither, on a Sunday morn in May, to look at
the rosy banks that sloped to the valleyed garden, as they had walked
there in February or March to see

"Winter, slumbering in the open air,
Wear on his smiling face a dream of spring,"

in the shape of the first crocuses and snowdrops that opened beside a
snow-drift still lingering on a shaded bank; and to watch the first
benumbed honey-bees who greeted every flower that bloomed in that
cherished spot, and who buzzed in bleak March winds over the purple
crocus and "blue flushing" grape