Nature simply ran riot and played according to her will like a child of the former days, bursting into apple blossom and laburnum gold and the bloom of peas and the white strawberry flower in early summer, and then, later in the year, weaving garlands of blazing red, yellow, white, purple, round beds of stolid roots and brakes of currant bushes.

There was a copper beech, where the birds sang, and from which they raided the fruit with the skill of Highland caterans.
The Lodge bees lived all day in this garden, save when they went to reinforce their sweetness from the heather bloom.

The big trees stood round the place and covered it from every wind except the south, and the sun was ever blessing it.

There was one summer-house, a mass of honeysuckle, and there they sat down as those that had come back to Eden from a wander year.
"Well, Kit ?" "Thank God for our Pleasaunce." And they would have stayed for hours, but there was one other spot that had a fascination for the General neither years nor wars had dulled, and he, who was the most matter-of-fact and romantic of men, must see and show it to his daughter before they ceased.
"A mile and more, Kit, but through the woods and by the water all the way." Sometimes they went down a little ravine made by a small burn fighting and wearing its way for ages to the Tochty, and stood on a bridge of two planks and a handrail thrown over a tiny pool, where the water was resting on a bed of small pebbles.

The oak copse covered the sides of the tiny glen and met across the streamlet, and one below could see nothing but greenery and the glint of the waterfall where the burn broke into the bosky den from the bare heights above.