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said, pointing to an enormously high hedge of impenetrable cypress, which ran in a straight line along the hillside.

Campbell opened a little door in the hedge and they passed through, the cypress grating on the hinges as they pushed it open. It formed a living green wall some eight or ten feet thick, like the rampart of an ancient castle. All at once they found themselves in a lovely terraced garden, with a smooth plateau of lawn, a fountain laughing and playing in the wind, and a terraced walk and parapet, half-buried in passion-flowers and ivy. Flowers were everywhere in the wildest confusion—rivers of roses, hedges of heliotrope, islands of orange blossoms. A high brick wall defended one angle of the hillside from the bolts and arrows of the prevailing winds, and was covered with fruit-trees, carefully trained and tended. From this wall every now and then a heavy ripe peach or apricot would drop down with a sudden thud in the stillness—“like the first of a thunder-shower.”

But it was not the charm of this fairy garden, lovely and fantastic as it seemed after the dark native landscape, which made Alice and her companion utter a sudden exclamation of delight.

Far, far below, floating to an immeasurable