The Doctor's Wife, Volume 1 (Paperback)

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. ISABEL. The garden at the back of Mr. Sleaford's house was a large square plot of ground, with fine old pear-trees sheltering a neglected lawn. A row of hazel-bushes screened all the length of the wall upon one side of the garden; and wherever you looked, there were roses and sweet-brier, es- paliered apples, and tall straggling raspberry- bushes, all equally unfamiliar with the gardener's pruning-knife; though here and there you came to a luckless bush that had been hacked at and mutilated in some amateur operations of the boys. It was an old-fashioned garden, and had doubtless once been beautifully kept; for bright garden-flowers grew up amongst the weeds summer after summer, as if even neglect or cruel usage could not disroot them from the familiarplace they loved. Thus rare orchids sprouted up out of beds that were half full of chickweed, and lilies-of-the-valley flourished amongst the groundsel in a shady corner under the water- butt. There were vines, upon which no grape had ever been suffered to ripen during Mr. Slea- ford's tenancy, but which yet made a beautiful screen of verdant tracery all over the back of the house, twining their loving tendrils about the dilapidated Venetian shutters, that rotted slowly on their rusted hinges. There were strawberry-beds, and there was an arbour at one end of the garden in which the boys played at beggar my neighbour and all fours with greasy, dog's-eared cards in the long summer afternoons; and there were some rabbit-hutches ?sure evidence of the neighbourhood of boys? in a sheltered corner under the hazel-bushes. It was a dear old, untidy place, where the odour of distant pigsties mingled faintly with the perfume of the roses; and it was in this neglected garden that Isabel Sleaford spent the best part ...