on the side of the pedestal. Her gown
touched the black letters.

The voice came nearer, and rose and rose more
passionately still. “Hide your face! don't look
at her! Oh, for God's sake, spare him!——”

The woman lifted her veil.

Sacred
TO THE MEMORY OF
LAURA,
LADY GLYDE,——

Laura, Lady Glyde, was standing by the
inscription, and was looking at me over the grave.

THE END OF THE FIRST PART.

ORCHARD HOUSES.

Two separate advantages are found to be
derived by the public from a reduction in the price,
by diminished taxation, of any commodity in
general use; namely, the expected advantage and
the unexpected advantage. “When sugar
suddenly dropped in price, some years ago, few
could have guessed that its immediate effect
would be the saving of a host of small
market-gardeners from very embarrassed
circumstances—many from ruin. Yet the steps
of the process were simple. Those gardeners
had in cultivation an immense quantity of
perishable strawberries, currants, gooseberries,
and raspberries, which (unlike the prunes, the
figs, and the raisins of the South) do not attain of
themselves sufficient sweetness to preserve them.
With high-priced sugar, their conversion into
preserves was a losing speculation; therefore,
what was not consumed immediately, was left to
rot upon the bushes. Even what was consumed,
sold badly. But, with cheap sugar, the same
despised fruits were at once bought up eagerly and
made into jams and jellies, not only for home
consumption, but for exportation, to be paid for
in hard cash, or by goods sent in return. The
gardeners paid their rents, cleared off their
mortgages, and bought their families the new
Sunday clothes, of which they had long been
standing in need.

Another illustrative instance of the good effects
of a liberal system appears to be manifesting itself
to the inhabitants of the British Islands. No one
can tell, even yet, what convenient and agreeable
results may be the consequence of cheap glass
Crystal palaces are things to admire and wonder
at; but photographic galleries, covered courts
glazed passages, increased sunlight in offices and
counting-houses, and inexpensive greenhouses
and aquaria, are all things of daily comfort and
entertainment. To these, Mr. Thomas Rivers,
of rose celebrity, has added a set of useful
and efficient constructions, to which he has given
the modest title of ORCHARD HOUSES.

When cheap glass was offered to the gardening
world, gardeners were far from anticipating
that cheap glass would ever knock down
garden-walls. It is not on Mr. Rivers's sole
authority that we state it is likely to do
so; because that gentleman, far-seeing
horticulturist as he is, might be suspected of
prejudice in favour of his own hobby. An
authority less liable to suspicion, Dr. Lindley,
foresees that Orchard Houses will serve both to
give trees a better climate by shelter, and to increase
their fruitfulness by maintaining an equipoise
of growth. No wall, under any conceivable
circumstances, can secure so good a climate
as a well-managed glass-house; for, in such a
structure we not only gain heat and repel cold,
but expose our plants incessantly to those rapid
currents of fresh air which are denied to a wall,
although they are the greatest cause of colour
and flavour. The learned professor further
predicts that the Orchard House System will be the
means of simplifying and facilitating the
business of PRUNING and TRAINING fruit-trees,
relieving gardeners of this troublesome and difficult
work, which consumes no end of labour, half
kills men in winter by cold, and, in summer, by
baking them against hot walls, and is constantly
attended by disappointment instead of being
rewarded with success.

What is the use of garden-walls? “To
keep out thieves,” answers some unreflecting
reader. Certainly, it must be allowed that walls
do, to some extent, help to exclude pilferers from
a tempting spot; but, in hundreds of gardens,
walls have been built solely for the purpose of
having fruit-trees nailed against them. Invent a
better mode of growing fruit-trees in the British
climate, and British garden-walls are sapped
and mined, ready to totter at the first high
wind. Mr. Rivers and his little book are the
Joshua and the trumpet at whose blast and
shoutings the brick and mortar fortifications
of the horticultural Jericho must eventually
crumble into dust.

Walls have hitherto had it all their own way,
for want of competition; nothing better has
appeared to rival them. Not to speak of their
expensiveness, a great check to the enterprising
gardener is the limited extent to which his wall
space can possibly be increased. It is of no use
making walls above a certain height; because
wall-trees only grow to a certain height. An
acre of garden, surrounded by a wall, will only
give a fixed extent of wall with south, east, and
western aspect, along its outer boundary. The
wall facing the north is of little use, except for
currants and Morello cherries. Walls running
across the middle of a garden, like the bars of a
gridiron, are melancholy and wasteful contrivances:
every square foot of sunshine they catch
is dearly paid for by an extensive area of cold
and shady border. The fruit-trees, unnaturally
trained and flattened against them, are diseased
and short-lived. Only compare a wall peach or
apricot tree, even in our southern counties, with
the standard peaches and apricots that grow
wild in the vineyards of Burgundy!

Neither do walls completely fulfil the duties
that are expected of them. Our finer fruits
(natives of climates that differ from and are in
some respects finer than our own) have all some
trifling peculiarity of constitution which unfits