When the ground had been levelled the gardener and the Lieutenant went about all day staking out grass plots and gravel walks. The old man informed the Lieutenant that it was no longer the custom to follow the severely regular French style. Now the paths must all be winding and the borders and flower beds in easy, graceful lines. What he had in mind for Mårbacka he called the English style; but the Lieutenant rather suspected that the style was the old man's own and not of foreign origin.
In front they laid out a big circular lawn, on one side of which they set out shrubbery in the shape of an egg, and on the other shrubbery in the form of a horn of plenty, while in the middle of the round they planted a weeping ash. Up toward the veranda they staked out a star-shaped flower bed, placing as a guard about it four provence-rose bushes—each on its own little round spot.
On the old sand-plot just below the kitchen windows they staked out a large triangle and filled it with rich soil, in which they transplanted the rose bushes from the old rose garden. For of roses they could never have enough. Along the front of the house they set out a low hedge of primroses, and two white-brier-rose bushes were given the places of honour, the one before the parlour window, the other before the front bedroom window.
The Lieutenant took such keen delight in this work that he went about with the gardener all day, and Fru
