even though most of the houses on the old estates have been destroyed.
Drayton Hall, however, stands, and the old Drayton estate, Magnolia, not
far distant from the Hall (which was on another estate), has one of the
most famous gardens in the world. Seven persons touching fingertips can
barely encircle the trunks of some of the live-oaks at Magnolia; there
are camellias more than twenty feet high, and a rose tree nearly as
large, but the great glory of the garden is its huge azaleas--ninety-two
varieties, it is said--which, when they blossom in the spring, are so
wonderful that people make long journeys for no other purpose than to
see them.

In "Harper's Magazine" for December, 1875, I find an account of the
gardens which were, at that time, far from new. The azaleas were then
twelve and thirteen feet tall; now, I am told, they reach to a height of
more than twenty feet, with a corresponding spread.

"It is almost impossible," says the anonymous writer of the article, "to
give a Northerner any idea of the affluence of color in this garden when
its flowers are in bloom. Imagine a long walk with the moss-draped
live-oaks overhead, a fairy lake and a bridge in the distance, and on
each side the great fluffy masses of rose and pink and crimson,
reaching far above your head, thousands upon tens of thousands of
blossoms packed close together, with no green to mar the intensity of
their color, rounding out in swelling curves of bloom down to the turf
below, not pausing a few inches above it and showing bare stems or
trunk, but spreading over the velvet, and trailing out like the rich
robes of an empress. Stand on one side and look across the lawn; it is
like a mad artist's dream of hues; it is like the Arabian nights; eyes
that have never had color enough find here a full feast, and go away
satisfied at last. And with all their gorgeousness, the hues are