Page:Walks in the Black Country and its green border-land.pdf/320

306 new charm from one felicitous feature it presents to the outside world. Through all the weeks and months of its glory, it is thrown open to the public. On Tuesdays and Fridays through the season all the sooty-faced, hard-handed, and heavy-shod men of the mine, forge, and furnace in all the Black Country, may come and luxuriate in these flower gardens without a farthing's charge for admission. Here they may ramble through the flowery mazes, and drink in their life and beauty, as free as air. Nor is this all. The great fountains are played for their entertainment on both these days; thus giving them the treat which the fountains of Versailles reserve for crowned guests. When they have sated their eyes with all this gorgeous show, and walked up and down the winding aisles of the great gallery of Nature's flower paintings, they are allowed to go up into the higher grounds of the park just beyond the green walls of the garden, and there, overlooking all its beauty, have their pic nic spread, and dance and frolic, without any restriction upon their hilarious freedom. The gardener told us something to their credit, corroborating a fact which has come to be widely noticed of late, that the roughest working men may be trusted with the closest view of costly treasures of art and nature, and that they are as unlikely to abuse that confidence as the classes that claim to be more highly cultivated in dispositions and