noon
After which , being fain of rest , they sat them down in a gallery which commanded the court , and was close imbosked with leafage and such flowers as the season afforded , and thither the discreet seneschal brought comfits and wines most choice and excellent , wherewith they were refreshed . Whereupon they hied them to a walled garden adjoining the palace ; which , the gate being opened , they entered , and wonder-struck by the beauty of the whole passed on to examine more attentively the several parts . It was bordered and traversed in many parts by alleys , each very wide and straight as an arrow and roofed in with trellis of vines , which gave good promise of bearing clusters that year , and , being all in flower , dispersed such fragrance throughout the garden as blended with that exhaled by many another plant that grew therein made the garden seem redolent of all the spices that ever grew in the East . The sides of the alleys were all , as it were , walled in with roses white and red and jasmine ; insomuch that there was no part of the garden but one might walk there not merely in the morning but at high noon in grateful shade and fragrance , completely screened from the sun . As for the plants that were in the garden , ` twere long to enumerate them , to specify their sorts , to describe the order of their arrangement ; enough , in brief , that there was abundance of every rarer species that our climate allows . In the middle of the garden , a thing not less but much more to be commended than aught else , was a lawn of the finest turf , and so green that it seemed almost black , pranked with flowers of , perhaps , a thousand sorts , and girt about with the richest living verdure of orange-trees and cedars , which shewed not only flowers but fruits both new and old , and were no less grateful to the smell by their fragrance than to the eye by their shade . In the middle of the lawn was a basin of whitest marble , graven with marvellous art ; in the centre whereof -- whether the spring were natural or artificial I know not -- rose a column supporting a figure which sent forth a jet of water of such volume and to such an altitude that it fell , not without a delicious plash , into the basin in quantity amply sufficient to turn a mill-wheel .