In the days when I deemed it necessary to hunt down in my well-thumbed Gray every flower of wood and field, and fit it to its Latin name, I used often to meet this phrase. At first, being young, I resented it. I scorned gardens: their carefully planned and duly tended splendors were not for me. The orchid in the deep woods or by the edge of the lonely swamp, the rare and long-sought heather in the open moorland, these it was that roused my ardor. And to find that some newly discovered flower was not a wild flower at all, but merely a garden flower "escaped"! The very word carried a hint of reprobation.

But as the years went on, the phrase gathered to itself meanings vague and subtle. I found myself welcoming it and regarding with a warmer interest the flower so described. From what old garden had it come? What associations and memories did it bring out[Pg 108] of the past? Had the paths where it grew been obliterated by the encroachments of a ruthless civilization, or had the tide of human life drawn away from it and left it to be engulfed by the forest from which it had once been wrested, with nothing left to mark it but a gnarled old lilac tree? I have chanced upon such spots in the heart of the wood, where the lilac and the apple tree and the old stoned cellar wall are all that are left to testify to the human life that once centred there. Or had the garden from which its seed was blown only fallen into a quiet decay, deserted but not destroyed, left to bloom unchecked and untended, and fling its seeds to the summer winds that its flowers might "escape" whither they would?

Lately, I chanced upon such a garden. I was walking along a quiet roadside, almost dusky beneath the shade of close-set giant maples, when an unexpected fragrance breathed upon me. I lingered, wondering. It came again, in a warm wave of the August breeze. I looked up at the tangled bank beside me—surely, there was a spray of box peeping out through the tall weeds! There was a[Pg 109] bush of it—another! Ah! it was a hedge, a box hedge! Here were the great stone steps leading up to the gate, and here the old, square capped fence-posts, once trim and white, now sunken and silver-gray. The rest of the fence was lying among the grasses and goldenrod, but the box still lived, dead at the top, its leafless branches matted into a hoary gray tangle, but springing up from below in crisp green sprays, lustrous and fragrant as ever, and richly suggestive of the past that produced it. For the box implies not merely human life, but human life on a certain scale: leisurely, decorous, well-considered. It implies faith in an established order and an assured future. A beautiful box hedge is not planned for immediate enjoyment; it is built up inch by inch through the years, a legacy to one\'s heirs.

Beside the gate-posts stood what must once have been two pillars of box. As I passed between them my feet felt beneath the matted weeds of many seasons the broad stones of the old flagged walk that led up through the garden to the house. Following it, I found, not the house, but the wide stone blocks of the old doorsteps, and beyond these, a ruin—gray[Pg 110] ashes and blackened brick, two great heaps of stone where the chimneys had been, with the stone slabs that lined the fireplaces fallen together. At one end was the deep stone cellar filled now with young beeches as tall as the house once was. Just outside stood two cherry trees close to t............