rocks overgrown with clematis, its
shadowy walks, and the splendid breadth of champaign that one saw from
the north-west corner. The garden and gardener seem part and parcel of
each other. When I take him from his right surroundings and try to make
him appear for me on paper, he looks unreal and phantasmal: the best
that I can say may convey some notion to those that never saw him, but
to me it will be ever impotent.

The first time that I saw him, I fancy Robert was pretty old already: he
had certainly begun to use his years as a stalking-horse. Latterly he
was beyond all the impudencies of logic, considering a reference to the
parish register worth all the reasons in the world. "_I am old and well
stricken in years_," he was wont to say; and I never found any one bold
enough to answer the argument. Apart from this vantage that he kept over
all who were not yet octogenarian, he had some other drawbacks as a
gardener. He shrank the very place he cultivated. The dignity and
reduced gentility of his appearance made the small garden cut a sorry
figure. He was full of tales of greater situations in his younger days.
He spoke of castles and parks with a humbling familiarity. He told of
places where under-gardeners had trembled at his looks, where there were
meres and swanneries, labyrinths of walk and wildernesses of sad
shrubbery in his control, till you could not help feeling that it was
condescension on his part to dress your humbler garden plots. You were
thrown at once into an invidious position. You felt that you were
profiting by the needs of dignity, and that his poverty and not his will
consented to your vulgar rule. Involuntarily you compared yourself with
the swineherd that made Alfred watch his cakes, or some bloated citizen
who may have given his sons and his condescension to the fallen
Dionysius. Nor were the disagreeables purely fanciful and metaphysical,
for the sway that he exercised over your feelings he extended to your
garden, and, through the garden, to your diet. He would trim a hedge,
throw away a favourite plant, or fill the most favoured and fertile
section of the garden with a vegetable that none of us could eat, in
supreme contempt for our opinion. If you asked him to send you in one of
your own artichokes, "_That I wull, mem_," he would say, "_with
pleesure, for it is mair blessed to give than to receive_." Ay, and
even when, by extra twisting of the screw, we prevailed on him to prefer
our comma