tionary on the indignities and insults that had been forced upon him. I endeavored feebly to stem the torrent of his indignation. At last even he had exhausted his rage, and the door closed, and I hoped at last that I might have a little peace and quiet; but in this matter I was 800n doomed to be disappointed. The other indignant person of the story, hearing through the friendly cook, to use his own expression, that his character was being taken away, also sought my presence. Then I heard a longer and still more incomprehensible tale, in which buttonholes, cabbages, indignities and insults were heaped one upon another. I listened wearily enough, gave no opinion, and determined from sheer inability to fathom the cause of the quarrel to pursue a grand policy of laisser aller. After this domestic crisis I attempted to read, but the words swam before my eyes, and my mind was incapable from nervous irritation of following any argument closely. Just as I was beginning to regain my calm, the door was flung open and the twins came in with a request that I would go on the lawn, and see them jump leap-frog. After that Mademoiselle joined us out of doors and informed me that my eldest daughter's manners and behavior toward her were a subject of sincere regret, qu'elle était d'une impertinence incroyable-and that she begged under the circumstances to give me notice. Closely following upon Closely following upon the heels of these events, the village schoolmaster called to complain that the curate had visited the National School on Friday and had told the children to stand up on his entrance. But that was a thing that he, Mr. Jones Thomas, representative of the majesty of the School Board, as he pictured himself to be, would not tolerate. He was good enough to say that he liked clergymen in their proper places. Apparently, he was not kind enough to in

clude the National School as one of them. In the midst of this discussion my cup overflowed by the announcement that my mastiff Brenda had bitten our most important tenant in the leg. Mr. Landcorn, it appears, had called to ask for considerable reductions. I was sorry for this, as I knew it would vex Jack, particularly as I was afraid that after this occurrence Mr. Landcorn would ask for still greater reductions.

"In the afternoon I drove with Jack, and we tried together his new pair. At five o'clock I opened a music hall at Durnford, and I made a little speech upon the development of musical feeling in the county. Stopping at the lodge on my way back, I got out and read a chapter of the Bible to my maid's old mother, who is dying of cancer. I was annoyed to find that she had not had on that day her basin of soup from the Hall as usual.

"I only got back to the house just in time to receive my guests. They consisted of a Whig peer, a Tory democrat, a stockbroker, a celebrated actress, a philanthropic Jew, an editor, an Agnostic, a Jesuit, and a Protestant tempered by Mahometanism. They all talked at dinner, but I was too tired to take an active part in the conversation myself. There was one little mishap-the fish did not arrive in time. Jack grumbled at this, and said it was my fault; that I ought to have remembered to have called for it in the afternoon when we were at Durnford. I am sometimes at a loss to solve the problem why a woman is always expected to do the remembering for her family through life. Memory is a special gift, and yet I never heard of any fairy godmother putting it into a child's cradle at her christening.

Fashionable doctors speak and write about two diseases alone; gout they give to men, nervous exhaustion to women.— Nineteenth Century.

THOSE who have had the good fortune to visit Pompeii will remember that important Greek addition to the Roman house, the peristylium, which became the centre of domestic life, while the atrium

was reserved for the reception of clients. It was a covered gallery with columns round an open court, from which the private rooms of the house received their air and light. It was larger than the atrium,

and the open space in the centre was also much larger. While the atrium had its reservoir, or impluvium, for receiving the rain-water, the peristylium usually had a fountain, or a piscina, surrounded with shrubs and flower-beds. This was often the sole viridarium or garden of the house, but many of the houses have besides a garden at the back, which had also frequently a fountain either in the centre or against the wall. In some of these gardens, as well as in the peristylia the root of the plants, the tiles round the beds. and the leaden pipes for the irrigation have been found. In the house of Pansa, one of the largest at Pompeii, in that of Epidius Rufus, and in another nameless house, the long, narrow, symmetrical rows of beds, leaving no room for regular paths, clearly show that the space had been devoted to the cultivation of vegetables. There, no doubt, grew the renowned Pompeian cabbage mentioned by Pliny and Columella. These gardens are divided from the houses by a portico with one small room opening out into it, prob. ably that of the gardener. In Pansa's house all traces of beds have now disappeared; they are preserved in that of Epidius Rufus, and behind the vegetable garden of this house there is a raised piece of ground which may have served as a flower-garden. Mazois, the ardent archæologist, who devoted the best years of a short life to the excavation and study of Pompeii * describes the garden of the house of Pansa and his emotion on seeing a small plant appear on the freshly excavated ground. He watched it from day to day with eager attention, but alas! it proved to be nothing but a wild pea common to that neighborhood, which after the removal of the soil had been swept by the rain into the ancient kitchen garden. "Il fallut," says Mazois, renoncer au plaisir d'avoir trouvé de l'herbe antique, mais malgré l'extravagance de ma première idée, j'eus de la peine à prendre la vérité de bonne grâce, il me semblait qu'elle me volait quelque chose."

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These vegetable gardens furnish an interesting illustration of a passage in Pliny's Natural History. Speaking of the way to lay out a garden he says: "The ground should be divided into plots or beds with

* He died in 1826 before his work was completed. The architect Gau continued it.

raised and rounded edges, each of which should have a path dug round it, by means of which access may be afforded to the gardener, and a channel formed for the water needed for irrigation." One perfectly isolated garden has been found with only a small habitation for the gardener attached to it. This was likewise laid out in symmetrical rows of beds which looked more business-like than ornamental; it was to all appearance a nursery-garden kept for mercantile purposes. Round one of the beds a row of pots, consisting of amphora divided from their upper parts, were found in the earth close together. These were evidently meant to hold plants or seedlings. "There are few establishments at Pompeii," says Overbeck, "which are so analogous to our own and present such a familiar look." In the house of Sallust, where there was but little room, the garden consisted of a pathway running along a portico. Flowers were planted in boxes on each side, and the outer wall was painted with fountain-jets, trees and birds to give an enlarged appearance. A charmingly decorated summer triclinium, or dining-room with an arbor opened into it. The stone seats, the leg of the table, the adjoining altar for the libations, the marble basin for receiving the fountain which sprang out of the wall, are still there, and it is difficult to realize that the life that once animated this lovely scene vanished from it more than eighteen hundred years ago!

Representations in fresco of gardens such as those on the walls of Sallust are very frequent at Pompeii, and though they are now unfortunately much faded, they still throw a curious light on the arrangements of the gardens in those days. They were introduced into mural decoration by the Roman landscape-painter Ludius, in the reign of Augustus, and seem to have been much in favor. They were especially intended for the walls of gardens and peristylia, but they have been found sometimes in other places-chiefly in bath-rooms-both at Pompeii and in Rome, and even in a tomb. Pliny the Younger mentions paintings of this kind. in his villa in Tuscany. In the letter describing his house and gardens he speaks of a room, which being situated close to a plane-tree enjoys a constant shade and green. It is sculptured in marble up to the podium, and above it is painted foliage

In a place like Pompeii, where the houses and gardens were small, these decorations had special advantages as they were intended to represent an extension of space. The designs were very varied, as may be seen from the fragments that remain. Among flowers and groups of trees there are fountains, statuary, trellis-work, large birds, such as peacocks-all of natural size,* and illustrating how much care was bestowed on the ornamental gardening of that period. Of all the paintings of this kind the best executed and best preserved have been found on the four walls of a chamber in the Villa ad Gallinas of Livia, excavated at Prima Porta near Rome in 1863. They represent the whole plan of a garden with trees, flowers and birds, and bear the stamp of a master's touch. In the necessarily rapid frescoexecution the salient features, such as the character of the foliage by which the trees are distinguished, have been vividly brought out, and it is thought not improbable that they may be by the hand of Ludius himself. But though inferior in execu tion none have come down to us with more touching associations than those which were found in the tomb of a Greek family near Rome on the Latin road between the tomb of the Scipios and the Columbarium. In a frieze above were the portraits of the different members of the family, twelve in number, with the names inscribed, and below it there was a painting of trees and birds with the blue sky seen through the foliage. On a stone in this tomb a remarkable inscription in Greek verse was found. The owner, identifying the painting with the reality, rejoices that no thorns and brambles grow round his tomb, and no night-birds shriek near his resting-place, but that his shrine is surrounded with beautiful trees and fruit-laden boughs, the cicada, the swallow and nightingale singing their melodious songs. His name was Patron. He did good to men on earth that in Hades also some lovely place might fall to his lot. He died in his youth, and all that now remained was the work he had done in his

This refers only to the garden representa. tions that cover the wall. There are other smaller ones in imitation of panel pictures.

lifetime. The tomb has been described by Padre Secchi, and Wörmann gives a very pretty German translation of the lines, which show that there existed in the ancient world, especially among the Greeks, as deep and genuine a love of Nature as could be found in modern times. The paintings have been ruthlessly removed, and it is not even known what has become of them.

In the Casa del Centenario, the remarkable house partly excavated in 1879 at the time of the eighteenth centenary of the eruption, there is a small garden, with a frieze representing an aquarium in which zoologists have recognized the present fauna of the Gulf of Naples. Two of the groups-a fight between a polype and a murena, and a lobster killing a murena-are remarkably well executed.

In that beautiful and interesting house of the Faun, the garden is surrounded by a portico with fifty six Doric columns. In the so-called house of Diomed the garden also has a portico, and it may be remembered that close to the gate were found two skeletons, believed to have been those of the master and his slave who tried to escape while the other members of the family had hidden in the cellars. With the assistance of the Pompeian pictures, and especially the description given by the Younger Pliny of his villa in Tuscany and various passages in the Elder's Natural History, it is not difficult to reconstruct the leading features of the Roman gardens.

They must have borne a close resemblance to those which Le Nôtre laid out in the seventeenth century, and of which we still find traces in old-fashioned country houses. This style had in fact grown out of various attempts made at different periods, especially since the Renaissance, to reproduce the classical gardens of antiquity. Straight alleys, not unfrequently converging to a centre, the so-called quincunx, symmetrically laid-out flowerbeds surrounded with box or tiles, close and double plantations of trees, shrubs clipped into hedges, pyramids, and sometimes men, animals, ships, letters, with the trellis-work, statuary and fountains we see in the Pompeian pictures-such were the main features of the gardens in the first century of the Empire. The tradition of them was more or less preserved in the monasteries all through the Middle Ages, and before Le Nôtre's time there

the East. Pliny describes the trees which created the admiration of the conqueror of this new world, and Diodorus of Sicily relates how he turned out of his way in his march from Celænæ to the Nissan plains to look at the gardens of Semiramis at the foot of Mount Bagistanus. The first botanical garden was subsequently founded at Athens by Theophrastus, the disciple and successor of Aristotle and the earliest known writer on botany; while private gardens came into use through Epicurus, who is said to have been the first to possess one. At the same time many attempts at acclimatization were made in various parts of Alexander's Empire, whence the plants passed into Italy. The worship of trees had been from the earliest time a great factor in the distribution of plants, as without the tree which the divinity had selected for himself, no temple could be erected to him, nor could his religious rites be performed. Thus the oak was sacred to Zeus, the laurel to Apollo, the olive to Athene, the myrtle to Aphrodite, the poplar to Heracles; and wherever the worship of these divinities was carried, a cutting from the holy tree of their temple had to be planted. These attempts were of course not always successful. Pliny relates on the authority of Theophrastus that Harpalus (Governor of Babylon under Alexander) vainly tried to naturalize the ivy, the plant of Bacchus, in Media, and he elsewhere mentions that at Panticapæum near the Cimmerian Bosporus (now Kertch in the Crimea), Mithridates and the inhabitants of the place made unsuccessful efforts to cultivate the myrtle and the laurel for certain religious rites. Sometimes, according to tradition, gods had planted their own sacred trees; Demeter brought the first fig-tree to Attica, Athene planted the olive on the Acropolis at Athens, and Aphrodite the pomegranate at Cyprus. The sacred trees and groves where the divinities dwelt afforded, like the altar, protection and right of asylum and were in their turn protected from injury and might not be cut down. Where the tree prospered, the god grew in favor. Sophocles speaks of the sway Bacchus held over Italy, and there can be no doubt that the ascendency of the Dionysian worship was owing to the volcanic soil of southern Italy being so peculiarly favorable to the culture of the vine. this blessed country Campania," writes

• In

Pliny, "rise those hills clad with vines, the juice of whose grape is extolled all over the world; this happy spot where, as the ancients used to say, Father Liber and Ceres are ever striving for the mastery."

The vine, the olive, the laurel, the myrtle, the fig, the pomegranate, the quince, the rose, the lily, the violet, had all probably been introduced into Italy at an early period by the Greek colonists.* The cypress, called by Pliny "an exotic difficult to naturalize," is believed to have come in somewhat later. Among the earliest plane-trees were those brought over from Sicily by the elder Dionysius. and planted in his garden at Rhegium, where they were looked upon as a great curiosity, but did not thrive. The planetree was famous throughout Greek antiquity, interwoven with many myths and sung by many poets. It was also much valued for its shade by the Romans, who in the latter days of the Republic planted it extensively in their villas and gardens. There existed a superstition that wine was nutritious to their roots, and a story is told of the orator Hortensius asking Cicero to take his turn in the law-court, because he had to go and give wine to his planetrees at Tusculum. The leafless trunk of the plane-tree appears in the beautiful mosaic of Alexander's battle found in the house of the Faun, and now in the Naples Museum. The date palm, which belongs essentially to hot climates, did not find in Italy suitable conditions to fulfil its destiny. It lived and gave an Oriental beauty to the scene, but became sterile. dates found in the Scavi were probably imported from Africa, for even Sicily lies outside the zone where they habitually ripen, and the limits of the fructifying palm were exactly the same in ancient times as they are now. The palm-tree probably came to Italy with the worship of Apollo, to whom Latona had given birth under the famous palm-tree at Delos, but its name, palma, which is derived according to Hehn from the Semitic tamar, shows that it must have first become known to the Romans through a different source. The earliest date with which the existence of the palm-tree in Italy can be connected is 291 B.C., when during a

The

*This must be understood of the cultivated plants only, for the vine, the myrtle, and the laurel grew wild in Southern Europe.