Under the sunny walls run straight wide borders, where the bees make merry among pinks and lilies, mignonette and gilliflowers, and the walls themselves are tangled with old-fashioned roses and honeysuckles. One double yellow rose tree of prodigious age is kept as the apple of the gardener's eye. Tradition tells that it was brought a hundred years ago from Damascus--a fact which I am quite willing to believe, for the knotted stem tells its own story, and certainly there never was a sweeter rose or one more worthy of coming from the far-famed gardens of the East. Many a thousand blossoms have I picked from its descendants, for it is the ancestor of a hardy race: every sucker of the family grows and thrives in the poorest soil, and covers itself each June with a thick mass of canary-colored blossoms. During the three weeks that the yellow briers were in flower every room in Eversley Rectory was decked out with flat bowls of them on a ground of green ferns, and purple-black pansies mingled with their golden blooms.
Round about the house masses of another yellow flower are planted with no sparing hand--the great St. John's wort. It is pleasant to look upon, but it has another value. Dare I tell it in the nineteenth century, this age of railroads and telegraphs and iron-clads, when space and time are in a fair way to be annihilated, and nothing is so sacred that it may not be questioned, no problem so hard that men may not try to solve it? In the days when Bramshill House was built our forefathers believed firmly in a whole unseen or rarely-seen world around them of fairies, ghosts, spirits and witches. In some out-of-the-way corners in England--even in these days of board schools and competitive examinations, when we are told that King Arthur never existed and that William Tell is a "sun-myth"--some remnants of this belief still linger. In Devonshire folks speak shyly and with bated breath of the "good people;" and even in the year of grace 1879 a Warwickshire laborer was had up before the magistrates for having with a pitchfork half killed a poor old woman whom he declared to be a witch. But be that as it may, in the reign of James I. no one doubted the existence of the spirit-world about us, and on St. John's Eve all its denizens, good and bad, were supposed to wander freely where they would. One only thing they feared, and that was the great St. John's wort. Therefore, all who wished to guard house and home from the unwelcome visitors, who pinched the maids, turned the milk sour and plagued their victims with a thousand impish tricks, planted it freely about their gardens; and thus it is that you see its golden flowers amid their shining rich green leaves and crimson shoots round nearly all old English homes.