up in his wife's best handkerchief!--or to hear him rebuke a
squalling child or a squabbling woman! The curate is nothing to
him. He is fit to be perpetual churchwarden.

We must now cross the lane into the shady rope-walk. That pretty
white cottage opposite, which stands straggling at the end of the
village in a garden full of flowers, belongs to our mason, the
shortest of men, and his handsome, tall wife: he, a dwarf, with the
voice of a giant; one starts when he begins to talk as if he were
shouting through a speaking trumpet; she, the sister, daughter, and
grand-daughter, of a long line of gardeners, and no contemptible one
herself. It is very magnanimous in me not to hate her; for she
beats me in my own way, in chrysanthemums, and dahlias, and the like
gauds. Her plants are sure to live; mine have a sad trick of dying,
perhaps because I love them, 'not wisely, but too well,' and kill
them with over-kindness. Half-way up the hill is another detached
cottage, the residence of an officer, and his beautiful family.
That eldest boy, who is hanging over the gate, and looking with such
intense childish admiration at my Lizzy, might be a model for a
Cupid.

How pleasantly the road winds up the hill, with its broad green
borders and hedgerows so thickly timbered! How finely the evening
sun falls on that sandy excavated bank, and touches the farmhouse on
the top of the eminence! and how clearly defined and relieved is the
figure of the man who is just coming
down! It is poor John Evans, the gardener--an excellent gardener
till about ten years ago, when he lost his wife, and became insane.
He was sent to St. Luke's, and dismissed as cured; but his power was
gone and his strength; he could no longer manage a garden, nor