soft garden-winds that rustle its shrubs are,
for the moment, genuine.

Another day and all is undone. The Rise
is its daily self again -- a road of flowers and
foliage that is less pleasant than a fairly well-
built street. And if you happen to find the
men at work on the re-transformation, you
become aware of the accident that made all
this difference. It lay in the little border of
wayside grass which a row of public servants --
men with spades and a cart -- are in the act
of tidying up. Their way of tidying it up is
to lay its little corpse all along the suburban
roadside, and then to carry it away to some
parochial dust-heap.

But for the vigilance of Vestries, grass would
reconcile everything. When the first heat of
the summer was over, a few nights of rain
altered all the colour of the world. It had
been the brown and russet of drought -- very
beautiful in landscape, but lifeless; it became
a translucent, profound, and eager green. The
citizen does not spend attention on it.

Why, then, is his vestry so alert, so appre-
hensive, so swift; in perception so instant, in
execution so prompt, so silent in action, so
punctual in destruction? The vestry keeps,

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