in its lawn, which is as smooth, as level, and as much like velvet as
grass has ever yet been made to look. Lily Dale, taking pride in her
own lawn, has declared often that it is no good attempting to play
croquet up at the Great House. The grass, she says, grows in tufts,
and nothing that Hopkins, the gardener, can or will do has any effect
upon the tufts. But there are no tufts at the Small House. As the
squire himself has never been very enthusiastic about croquet, the
croquet implements have been moved permanently down to the Small
House, and croquet there has become quite an institution.

And while I am on the subject of the garden I may also mention Mrs
Dale's conservatory, as to which Bell was strenuously of opinion that
the Great House had nothing to offer equal to it--"For flowers, of
course, I mean," she would say, correcting herself; for at the Great
House there was a grapery very celebrated. On this matter the squire
would be less tolerant than as regarded the croquet, and would tell
his niece that she knew nothing about flowers. "Perhaps not, Uncle
Christopher," she would say. "All the same, I like our geraniums
best;" for there was a spice of obstinacy about Miss Dale,--as,
indeed, there was in all the Dales, male and female, young and old.

It may be as well to explain that the care of this lawn and of this
conservatory, and, indeed, of the entire garden belonging to the
Small House, was in the hands of Hopkins, the head gardener to the
Great House; and it was so simply for this reason, that Mrs Dale
could not afford to keep a gardener herself. A working lad, at ten
shillings a week, who cleaned the knives and shoes, and dug the
ground, was the only male attendant on the three ladies. But Hopkins,
the head gardener of Allington, who had men under him, was as widely
awake to the lawn and the conservatory of the humbler establishment