Never had the garden looked more meetly set, never had the sun shone more genially, and the air impelled the blood and sent it coursing more joyously through his veins, than on that morning of the rejuvenescence of all his high ideals.
Then he drew a small blue volume out of his pocket, and lay down on the grass with his back against the trunk of an apple-tree.

Austin's theory--or one of his theories, for he had hundreds--was that one's literature should always be in harmony with one's surroundings; and so, intending to pass his morning in the garden, he had chosen 'The Garden of Cyrus' as an appropriate study.

He opened it reverently, for it was compact of jewelled thoughts that had been set to words by one of the princes of prose.

He, the young garden-lover, sat at the feet of the great garden-mystic, and began to pore wonderingly over the inscrutable secrets of the quincunx.

His fine ear was charmed by the rhythm of the sumptuous and stately sentences, and his pulses throbbed in response to every measured phrase in which the lore of garden symmetry and the principles of garden science were set forth.