their way slowly towards
the neighbourhood of the old oaks and beech-trees. Others consorted
most freely with the wall-fruit, or seemed made for pot-pourri to
sweeten the old black mahogany furniture. The sweet-pea stacks loved
the broad path through the kitchen garden; the old-fashioned garden
azalea was the making of a nosegay, with its honey which clung to one's
finger. There were flowers all the sweeter for a battle with the rain;
a flower like aromatic medicine; another like summer lingering into
winter; it ripened as fruit does; and another was like August, his own
birthday time, dropped into March.

The very mould here, rich old black gardener's earth, was flower-seed;
and beyond, the fields, one after another, through the white gates
breaking the well-grown hedge-rows, were hardly less garden-like;
little velvety fields, little with the true sweet English littleness of
our little island, our land of vignettes. Here all was little; the
very church where they went to pray, to sit, the ancient Uthwarts
sleeping all around outside under the windows, deposited there as
quietly as fallen trees on their native soil, and almost unrecorded, as
there had been almost nothing to record; where however, Sunday after
Sunday, Emerald Uthwart reads, wondering, the solitary memorial of one
soldierly member of his race, who had,--well! who had not died here
[201] at home, in his bed. How wretched! how fine! how inconceivably
great and difficult!--not for him! And yet, amid all its littleness,
how large his sense of liberty in the place he, the cadet doomed to
leave it--his birth-place, where he is also so early to die--had loved
better than any one of them! Enjoying hitherto all the freedom of the
almost grown-up brothers, the unrepressed noise, the unchecked hours,
the old rooms, all their own way, he is literally without the
consciousness of rule. Only, when the long irresponsible day is over,
amid the dew, the odours, of summer twilight, they roll their
cricket-field against to-morrow's game. So it had always been with the
Uthwarts; they never went to school. In the great attic he has chosen
for himself Emerald awakes;--it was a rule, sanitary, almost medical,
never to rouse the children--rises to play betimes; or, if he choose,
with window flung open to the roses, the sea, turns to sleep again,
deliberately, deliciously, under the fine old blankets.

A rather sensuous boy! you may suppose, amid the wholesome, natural