One of the advantages of being “little people in a little place” is the pleasure small things can give one. The Duke of Devonshire has seventy men in his garden. Is it possible to imagine taking an interest in anything conducted on so enormous a scale? It is not gardening, it is horticultural government! There can be no individual knowledge of any “beloved flower,” as our Dutch friend has it. Outside a millionaire’s greenhouse we once beheld regiment after regiment of Begonia pots. It made one’s brain reel. How insupportable anything so repeated would become!

Even in small gardens there is too much of a tendency nowadays to overdo garden effects. The flagged-path effect can certainly be overdone. We were tempted to visit a farmhouse the other day, adorably placed on a high Sussex down just where a stretch of table-land dominates an immense panorama of undulating country, and a vast half-circle of horizon. With a few more trees no situation could have been more beautiful.

“It was a party of the name of Mosensohn” who had taken the old farmhouse, we are told, and they were transmogrifying it according to the most modern principles of how the plutocrat’s farmhouse should look.

In some ways it was very well done. The fine old lines of wall and roof were carefully preserved; the high brick wall with its arched doorway and door with the grille in it, were quite in keeping, and gave one a sense of comfortable seclusion as one stepped in off the high road.

But the square court, once the farmyard, divided by two different levels, was completely flagged. Only a few beds against the wall, and a strip of turf on the lower level under the house, afforded any relief to the eye. There was a sunk garden beyond which was turfed, and the sense of rest it instantly afforded made one realize what the incoming family will suffer on a scorching August day from the glare and refractions of the flags in a space so hemmed in. In the right spirit of garden mania, we were not above taking what hints we could. And some were very good. All the beds on that first level were planted with cool-looking blue and purple flowers—a happy thought where there was so much hot stone. And the old cow stables had been very cleverly converted into a most Italian-looking brick pergola which ran the length of the sunk Rose Garden, and ended in a round summer-house with a window. From there, as well as from the Rose Garden, the wide view over the Downs met the gaze. Vividly coloured herbaceous borders ran along the side nearest to the sudden slope of the hill. There is something very pleasing to the senses when the glance passes from such an ordered kaleidoscope of colour to the misty vastness of a far-reaching view.

In the middle of the Rose Garden was a sunk fountain in a long narrow basin.

A batch of pinewood, dark and shady, would have saved the situation; one sought everywhere for the comfort of real shadows.

We went into the house, which was in the act of being papered and painted for the millionaires. Delightful in theory as such old buildings are, we were seized with doubt from the moment of crossing the threshold whether any sense of quaint antiquity would compensate one for beams on top of one’s head, for bedrooms the size of a bath-towel, and a general feeling of having one foot on the hearth and another in the passage. We thought the newcomers had shown more taste outside, and came to the conclusion that some one else’s taste ruled in the garden, but that they had allowed their own ideas free scope indoors. These ideas were monotonous. The parlour that gave on the little orchard had a paper all over green parrots; the best bedroom upstairs had a paper all over blue parrots; and the second best bedroom was adorned with terra-cotta parrots. The only chance for a conglomeration of rooms so hopelessly low and contracted, would have been a plain distemper of no tint deeper than cream, or at the outside butter colour. Then the old beams would have had a chance, and one might have felt able to draw one’s breath.

Fancy waking in the morning to the dance of all the little parrots on top of one’s eyelids!

Then, out of a small space, the shapes of trees and flower-beds beyond come upon the vision with no sense of effect if the space within is tormented. Neither can anyone have any proper appreciation of the joy of a bunch of flowers, or a vase of spreading boughs, who has not set them against plain walls where their shadows have play.

Another little house near here—set down in the valley this, on the edge of a hamlet, overlooking a wide pond—has been to our thinking more successfully dealt with. Three very old cottages have been knocked into one, and the whole little rambling up-and-down dwelling-place thus produced has been boldly distempered white within from roof to kitchen. The round black oak beams are delightful in these little white rooms, and the pretty, blue-eyed, still youthful spinster who owns them has been content with a short pair of clear white muslin curtains in every window; not, be it understood, the London bedroom kind that cuts across the pane an abomination difficult to avoid in towns, but proper curtains hanging over the recess. Nothing more suitable could be devised, and it took a “real lady,” in the sense of Hans Andersen’s “Real Princess,” to be content with such fresh simplicity. But attractive as her furnishing is, and full of genuinely beautiful things, there our tastes slightly diverged.

The largest sitting-room has a set of black lacquer furniture inlaid with vivid mother-of-pearl; it is deliciously gay in this gay cottage parlour, and certainly no one who possessed these early Victorian treasures could bear to put them on one side. We think if we had been the lucky owner, however, we would have eschewed coupling them with velvet—or, indeed, brought velvet at all under those weather beaten tiles. The mistress of the Villino had a vision—a daring vision—of printed linen with scarlet cherries and impossible birds pecking at them; something with a true Jacobean angularity in it, to link the centuries together, and an uncompromising vividness of tint. That for cushions and sofa-covers. On the floor then, no bright carpet would be admitted. We should have enamelled that floor white, and cast a few rugs down on it, with no more colours in them than faint lemons and greys or creams.

To complete this discursion on cottages, some of us visited the other day a tiny house, where all the downstairs rooms, except the kitchen, had been thrown together, making a charming, long, low living-room with one great black beam across the ceiling. On the walls was a perfect cottage paper, with isolated pink rose-buds well-distanced from each other: a pink rosebud chintz and black carpet dotted with faint stiff roses, made quaint and unusual but very satisfying arrangement. The windows looked out on a pine wood across a hedge of rampant pink Dorothy Roses. Gazing out on the dim, dark green grey aisles of the fir trees one would want the gay note within; and the little Rose-strewn paper was perfection.

Yesterday the Grandfather of Loki dragged the Grandmother in her bath-chair out into the heart of the moors. It’s a sporting bath-chair this. It has been over as much rough ground as a horse artillery gun-carriage, and nothing in the matter of obstacles stops it unless it is barbed wire; it was chosen as light in make as possible, and now it has a rakish, weather-beaten appearance, like an old mountain mule.

The rare strangers we meet on our wild career regard us with varied sentiments. Some are obviously filled with compassion over the joggling the occupant of the bath-chair must be enduring. “What can that fool of a man be about to expose that wretchedly delicate woman to such suffering?” their expression says to us as they pass. Others, on the other hand, are horror-stricken at the spectacle of the wifely brutality that condemns this weakly, good-natured man to the task of lugging her about. There is a good deal of uphill work, of course, about us, and he goes a good pace. “You ought to get a donkey, Madam,” is their conclusion.

On two or three occasions good Samaritans have rushed to assist him, with glances of scathing rebuke at this new embodiment of woman’s tyranny.

But they are some of our best days, in spite of outside disapproval. And, to go back to yesterday, we started off with all the dogs in a state of “high cockalorum”—Arabella in her most obsequious mood having been scolded the day before for running away; Loki, the Chinaman, trotting on in determined and splendid isolation as usual, it being quite against Chinese etiquette to speak to any fur-brother outside the garden gates; Betty, and her father Laddie, secretly determined to go hunting, no matter what execrations should be hurled after them. Laddie comes from a neighbouring house, and insists on adopting us as his family. It is very hard to be brutal and say that we won’t be adopted when a pair of the most beautiful cairngorm eyes in all the world are looking up at us out of the dear long, wise, pathetic dog face. In fact, we are not brutal; and Laddie comes and goes as he likes. Only he is occasionally carried back to his cook who, it seems, duly loves him by Juvenal the tender-hearted.

It is very difficult to reach the moors, with this discursiveness! But, in a sunshine as blazing as that which ever fell from any Italian sky, we did get into the hollow of the heather hills, and there spend an afternoon of perfect dreaminess and pleasure.

Loki’s Grandfather took off his coat and marched up the slippery paths, the bath-chair bumping merrily after him. It is one of his male prerogatives to scorn the idea of sunstroke, and Loki’s Grandmother is filled with apprehensions half the time. But when she saw him stretched on a rug over the heather, smoking his pipe, and the four dogs cast themselves down in attitudes expressive of their different natures, the mental horizon became cloudless. The material skies—if such an adjective can be used in such connexion—the unplumbed dome of mystery above us, were by no means cloudless, and that was part of their wonderful beauty. Huge lazy white clouds, so luminous as to be dazzling, sailed over the rim of the moor and cast shadows of indescribable mauve and purple into the hollows. A day of such intense light it was that every tree in the thick of the woods flung its patch of shadow, purple-dark against the vivid green. And, oh, the colour of the Ling, mixed with Hill Heather, set with islands of Bracken—Bracken in its proper place—silver under the sun rays, against the blue! And the scent of the Heath and the Whin!

One doesn’t know if it is exactly one’s soul that the beauty touches, the appeal is so strongly to the senses. But the soul is of it; for no mere physical joy can give such a serenity, such an airiness as of wings to the spirit. Mr. A. C. Benson says, in some early book of his, that one of the great proofs to him of the existence of God is the feeling which comes at the sight of a very beautiful prospect. We want to give ourselves to it—he says—to be absorbed into it; and that is a movement of the soul, for everything earthly is possessive.

Arabella, who is a very affectionate dog, flung herself down beside her master, taking up a large share of the rug, and pensively chewed gorse half the time, the other half being absorbed in extracting its prickles from her chest. Laddie, of course, slipped off to the chase. The two little dogs, russet brother and little white sister, whiled away a period of inaction: Betty, by circling round the bath-chair, jumping in to assure its occupant that she loved her very much and out again to show that she was a dog of tact; and Loki, panting in his great fur coat in which condition he grins like a Chinese dragon with his roseleaf tongue bent back in the oddest little loop between his white teeth by seeking cool spots wherein to repose—preferably under the very wheel of the chair, to his Grandmother’s distraction.

An afternoon to remember, when nothing happened but the greatest happenings of all: God’s good gifts of sun and wild moor and balmy air!