. I think that, as a
schoolmaster, one might do very good work as a peripatetic talker. I
have a big garden here--to think that you have never seen it!--with a
great screen of lilacs and some pleasant gravel walks. I never enter
it, I am afraid. But if in the pleasant summer I could learn the art of
sitting there, of having tea there, and making a few boys welcome if
they cared to come, it would be good for all of us, and would give the
boys some pleasant memories. I don't think there is anything gives me a
pleasanter thrill than to recollect the times I spent as a boy in old
Hayward's garden. He told me and Francis Howard that we might go and
sit there if we liked. You were not invited, and I never dared to ask
him. It was a pleasant little place, with a lawn surrounded with trees,
and a summer-house full of armchairs, with an orchard behind it--now
built over. Howard and I used at one time to go there a good deal, to
read and talk. I remember him reading Shakespeare's sonnets aloud,
though I had not an idea what they were all about--but his rich,
resonant voice comes back to me now; and then he showed me a MS. book
of his own poems. Ye Gods, how great I thought them! I copied many of
them out and have them still. Hayward used to come strolling about; I
can see him standing there in a big straw hat, with his hands behind
him, like the jolly old leisurely fellow he was. "Don't get up, boys,"
he used to say. Once or twice he sate with us, and talked lazily about
some book we were reading. He never took any trouble to entertain us,
but I used to feel that we were welcome, and that it really pleased him
that we cared to come. Now he lives in a suburb, on a pension: why do I
never go to see him?

"La, Perry, how yer do run on!" as the homely Warden's wife said to the
voluble Chaplain. I never meant to write you such a letter; but I am
glad indeed to find you really settling down. We must cultivate our
garden, as Voltaire said; and I only wish that the garden of my own
spirit were more full of "shelter and fountains," and less stocked with
long rows of humble vegetables; but there are a few flowers here and
there.--Ever yours,

T. B.

MONK'S ORCHARD, UPTON,
July 11, 1904.

MY DEAR HERBERT,--I am going to pour out a pent-up woe. I have just
escaped from a very fatiguing experience. I said good-bye this morning,
with real cordiality, to a thoroughly uncongenial and disagreeable
visitor. You will probably be surpr