Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III HAND in hand, Alice and Asia paused at the wooden gate outside the double wall of pines. Oh, Mother, whispered the child breathlessly, clutching her hand. Through the trees they saw hot masses of colour. They heard the deep hum of a billion bees. They sniffed a sensuous air heavy with known and unknown scents. Trembling with anticipation, they opened the gate and stole in a yard or two, only to stand again. Some gardens, like great masses of complex machinery, arrest and fascinate the intellect, and satisfy one's sense of arrangement, of clockwork management. They have no mysteries, however, no nestling places, no dream-compelling nooks. But inside that phalanx of pines above the river there grew a wonderful garden with all these things; a garden of dreams, a garden riotous with life; a garden of brilliant sunlights and deep shades; a garden of trees that hid the stars and of shy flowers barely peeping from the ground; a whispering garden full of secrets and suggestion; a garden where there was always something more to know. Trees from England, trees from the semi-tropical islands, and trees from the native forest grew there side by side. There were creamy magnolias, pink and salmon lasiandras, sweet laburnum, banana palms, white trailing clematis, the scarlet kowhai and bowers of tree ferns. Azaleas and jasmine and lilac and mock orange bushes were dotted about at random on the lawns. There were beds and beds of stocks and geraniums, and roses and sweet-williams, and snapdragons and larkspurs, and lupins and lilies, and late narcissi and anemones, and early gladioli. There were jonquilsin the grass, and violets and primroses filling up odd spaces everywhere. There were honeysuckled summer-houses and ivy-wreathed stumps, and marble bowls on rough stone pe...