front yards filled with ornamental shrubbery, and gardens at the back,
an acre or two in extent; they were fenced in with iron pickets, and
there were gates to the driveways, on which the children swung. Every
normal child supposes that gates are made for no other purpose. The
trees were not large, but there were many of them, and they were thick
with leaves. There was a damp, arboreal smell everywhere, mingled with
the finer perfume of flowers and of the hawthorns and yellow
laburnums. Flowers, especially purple English violets, grew profusely
in the gardens, and gooseberry-bushes, bearing immense gooseberries
such as our climate does not nourish. There were also armies of
garden--snails, handsome gasteropods, which were of great interest to
me; for I was entering, at this period, upon a passionate pursuit of
natural history. For many years I supposed that the odor of the
violets proceeded from snails, and to this day I always associate
snails with violets, or vice versa. Una, Rose, and I were given each a
section of a garden-bed for our own; I cultivated mine so assiduously
that it became quite a deep hole; but I do not recall that anything
ever grew in it. The soil was a very rich loam, and ceaseless
diligence must have been required in me to keep it barren.

Gray skies, frequent showers, a cool or semi-chilly mildness, varied
every little while by the intrusion of a yellow fog from Liverpool,
over the river--such was the climate of Rock Park. There were
occasional passages of sunshine; but never, that I recollect, an
entire day of it. The stucco of the villas was streaked with green
dampness, and peeling off here and there. I suspect that the fashion
of castellated, stuccoed villas may have been set in the eighteenth
century by Horace Walpole when he built that marvellous edifice known
as Strawberry Hill. I first saw that achievement twenty years after
the time of which I now write, and recognized in it, as I thought, the