The ways of our musings are as devious, as unexpected, as those of a general conversation: there is no presiding spirit to keep us to a standing topic! This topic, with us, should be “Our Sentimental Garden.” And our tattle should, really, be connected, even if but distantly; with plants or scenery; with country life and friends or foes; with emotions or reminiscences plausibly evoked by the flower side of life. Happily it is pleasant enough to be brought back to the right theme; as I am just now by a thought of the head-line.

To one who has taken somewhat late in the day to a life in the country, most of its interests seem to be a rediscovery of early, simple, and intimate delights; to be connected with impressions long forgotten.

There is an episode in the biography of Jean-Jacques Rousseau which, if I remember aright, bears upon this point. I have not got the Confessions by me—it is, no doubt, in that cynical autobiography that the anecdote is recorded—nor, indeed, any other work of that exceedingly antipathetic writer. This is the usual course: the books I require for reference when in the country happen oftener than not to be on my London bookshelves; and mutatis mutandis, vice versa! The precise wording cannot in consequence be given here. But it is a small matter; the story is to this effect:

In his young and singularly impressionable days, Jean-Jacques was taking a country walk with one very near to his heart. At a certain spot of the garden, or the wood, in which he was tasting the subtle joys of solitude À deux, the lady suddenly exclaimed:

“See, yonder is a pervenche!”

“Indeed,” returned the youth, little intent then, upon the beauties of the outer world, and gazed absently upon the tender blue peeping out of the tender green. “So, that is a periwinkle?” And he resumed the thread of his interrupted discourse.

But, later—much later on, in twilight days of his life—some one happened again to say in his hearing:

“See—a Periwinkle!”

And Rousseau, now old Jean-Jacques, amazed the company by an almost incredible exhibition of sensibility.

“Une pervenche! Where—where?” he called out, throwing himself down on his knees to look for the flower, with eyes bathed in tears.

If this is not quite the exact tale, it matters, as I said above, very little. It is the story, in its essence. The age of sensibility praise be to our fate! is no longer with us; but there is something permanently true in the picture it sets forth. To the philosophe of mature years the mere word pervenche suddenly recalled, in a poignantly intimate manner, the first love of his spring-time. Veteris vestigia flammae!

And we are not to wonder that the echo from a world irremediably lost should have affected the morose, self-centred reprobate in an uncontrollable manner. I venture to think that, with the least sentimental of us, the sudden rediscovery, of some long forgotten youthful impression can hardly fail to evoke, however transiently, a certain dreamy emotion: half pleasure, half melancholy.

Now, in the case of the Master of the House—and he is thankful to realize it—early memories of delight in flowers and such things are associated, not with the troublous times of young manhood’s protean heart affairs, not with the Sturm und Drang days of the dawning moustache, but rather with the quaintly fanciful inner life of boyhood. They come back borne upon the colours and odours of such early friends as Lilac and Acacia; common Wallflower—GiroflÉe, our Gillyflower; wild Violet and Primrose—gallicÉ “Coucou”; Hollyhock or rather Rose-trÉmiÈre; Lily-of-the-Valley; Muguet.... It is the old French name that most readily slips from my pen.

Owing perhaps to a childhood spent almost wholly in France, and to the completeness of the break that necessarily ensued when the English born but French nurtured boy was at last allowed back to his own and proper land, all these memories seem to belong to a world utterly apart—to something rather fantastic, unconnected with later life and interests. Moreover, being of childhood and of a time when the world seemed uniformly kind, they retain an allurement all their own. One pleasant recollection of those far-off days does not hook on to others, bitter, regretful, or let it be even merely ruffling ... inevitable chain of responsible experiences!

Our early memories are like works of art: they have a way of perpetuating in beauty things that perhaps were not really beautiful in themselves. About them there is an unconscious selection which, having been made by a mind still essentially serene, has contrived a subtle harmony of all the elements. Upon the pictures of its store, a child’s memory lays an emphasis strangely different to that which the critical powers of later growth would set. And it is this quaint insistence on certain “odd corners of things” which among other reasons makes them so dearly personal and private to the older mind.

In my own case, as I have said, they belong to a world still more remote than the childhood of most men of “Grandpa” status—a world which has not even the link of language to connect it with the present!

Paradoxically, this is perhaps the reason why I take so much pleasure in finding these happy-hued and odorous things now rising, and living under their right English names, in a garden of my own. To the other denizens of Villino Loki they are part of the excellent general company foregathering in our garden: but to me they are in many ways my intimates. We seem “to have known things together”; things doubtless of no importance, but pleasant to recall in casual intercourse.