Chapter 61

CHAPTER 61
How a Gardener may get rid of the Dormice that eat His
Peaches.

Not on the same night, as he had intended, but the next
morning, the Count of Monte Cristo went out by the Barrier
d'Enfer, taking the road to Orleans. Leaving the village of
Linas, without stopping at the telegraph, which flourished
its great bony arms as he passed, the count reached the
tower of Montlhery, situated, as every one knows, upon the
highest point of the plain of that name. At the foot of the
hill the count dismounted and began to ascend by a little
winding path, about eighteen inches wide; when he reached
the summit he found himself stopped by a hedge, upon which
green fruit had succeeded to red and white flowers.

Monte Cristo looked for the entrance to the enclosure, and
was not long in finding a little wooden gate, working on
willow hinges, and fastened with a nail and string. The
count soon mastered the mechanism, the gate opened, and he
then found himself in a little garden, about twenty feet
long by twelve wide, bounded on one side by part of the
hedge, which contained the ingenious contrivance we have
called a gate, and on the other by the old tower, covered
with ivy and studded with wall-flowers. No one would have
thought in looking at this old, weather-beaten,
floral-decked tower (which might be likened to an elderly
dame dressed up to receive her grandchildren at a birthday
feast) that it would have been capable of telling strange
things, if, -- in addition to the menacing ears which the
proverb says all walls are provided with, -- it had also a
voice. The garden was crossed by a path of red gravel, edged
by a border of thick box, of many years' growth, and of a
tone and color that would have delighted the heart of
Delacroix, our modern Rubens. This path was formed in the
shape of the figure of 8, thus, in its windings, making a
walk of sixty feet in a garden of only twenty.

Never had Flora, the fresh and smiling goddess of gardeners,
been honored with a purer or more scrupulous worship than
that which was paid to her in this little enclosure. In
fact, of the twenty rose-trees which formed the parterre,
not one bore the mark of the slug, nor were there evidences
anywhere of the clustering aphis which is so destructive to
plants growing in a damp soil. And yet it was not because
the damp had been excluded from the garden; the earth, black
as soot, the thick foliage of the trees betrayed its
presence; besides, had natural humidity been wanting, it
could have been immediately supplied by artificial means,
thanks to a tank of water, sunk in one of the corners of the
garden, and upon which were stationed a frog and a toad,
who, from antipathy, no doubt,