through the Pyrenees and
walked when he would have slept but had to walk or freeze: and by some
queer rule that guides us he treasured them both in his memory, these
happy days in this garden and the frozen nights on the peaks.

For Serafina showed Rodriguez the garden that behind the house ran
narrow and long to the wild. There were rocks with heliotrope pouring
over them and flowers peeping behind them, and great azaleas all in
triumphant bloom, and ropes of flowering creepers coming down from
trees, and oleanders, and a plant named popularly Joy of the South, and
small paths went along it edged with shells brought from the far sea.

There was only one street in the village, and you did not go far among
the great azaleas before you lost sight of the gables; and you did not
go far before the small paths ended with their shells from the distant
sea, and there was the mistress of all gardeners facing you, Mother
Nature nursing her children, the things of the wild. She too had
azaleas and oleanders, but they stood more solitary in their greater
garden than those that grew in the garden of Dona Mirana; and she too
had little paths, only they were without borders and without end. Yet
looking from the long and narrow garden at the back of that house in
Lowlight to the wider garden that sweeps round the world, and is fenced
by Space from the garden in Venus and by Space from the garden in Mars,
you scarce saw any difference or noticed where they met: the solitary
azaleas beyond were gathered together by distance, and from Lowlight to
the horizon seemed all one garden in bloom. And afterwards, all his
years, whenever Rodriguez heard the name of Spain, spoken by loyal men,
it was thus that he thought of it, as he saw it now.

And here he used to walk with Serafina when she tended flowers in the
cool of the morning or went at evening to water favourite blooms. And
Rodriguez would bring with him his mandolin, and sometimes he touched
it lightly or even sang, as they rested on some carved seat at the
garden's end, looking out towards shadowy shrubs on the shining hill,
but mostly he heard her speak of the things she loved, of what moths
flew to their garden, and which birds sang, and how the flowers grew.
Serafina sat no longer in her balcony but, disguising idleness by other
names, they loitered along those paths that the seashells narrowed; yet
there was a grace in their loitering such as we have not in our dances
now. And ev