A Garden, Sir, Wherein All

Tis The Hard Grey Weather Breeds Hard English Men.

A Garden, Sir, Wherein All Rainbows And Flowers Were Heaped Together.

Now, To Tell My Story--if Not As It Ought To Be Told, At Least As I Can Tell It,--i Must Go Back Sixteen Years, To The Days When Whitbury Boasted Of Forty Coaches Per Diem, Instead Of One Railway, And Set Forth How In Its Southern Suburb, There Stood Two Pleasant House Side By Side, With Their Gardens Sloping Down To The Whit, And Parted From Each Other Only By The High Brick Fruit-wall, Through Which There Used To Be A Door Of Communication; For The Two Occupiers Were Fast Friends.

And No One Has The Right To Say That No Water-babies Exist, Till They Have Seen No Water-babies Existing; Which Is Quite A Different Thing, Mind, From Not Seeing Water-babies; And A Thing Which Nobody Ever Did, Or Perhaps Will Ever Do. But Surely ... They Would Have Put It Into Spirits, Or Into The Illustrated News, Or Perhaps Cut It Into Two Halves, Poor Dear Little Thing, And Sent One To Professor Owen, And One To Professor Huxley, To See What They Would Each Say About It.

Pray Over Every Truth; For Though The Renewed Heart Is Not "desperately Wicked," It Is Quite Deceitful Enough To Become So, If God Be Forgotten A Moment.