I began about Noah and the flood.

“Did it rain _so_ badly?” she asked with a face of the deepest concern

and interest.

“Yes, all day long and all night long for weeks and weeks——”

“And was everybody so wet?”

“Yes—”

“But why didn’t they open their umbwellas?”

Just then I saw the nurse coming out with the tea-tray.

“I’ll tell you the rest another time,” I said, putting her off my knee,

greatly relieved; “you must all go to Anna now and have tea.”

“I don’t like Anna,” remarked the June baby, not having hitherto opened

her lips; “she is a stupid girl.”

The other two stood transfixed with horror at this statement, for,

besides being naturally extremely polite, and at all times anxious not

to hurt any one’s feelings, they had been brought up to love and

respect their kind little nurse.

The April baby recovered her speech first, and lifting her finger,

pointed it at the criminal in just indignation. “Such a child will

never go into the _Himmel_,” she said with great emphasis, and the air

of one who delivers judgment.

_September_ 15_th_.—This is the month of quiet days, crimson creepers,

and blackberries; of mellow afternoons in the ripening garden; of tea

under the acacias instead of the too shady beeches; of wood-fires in

the library in the chilly evenings. The babies go out in the afternoon

and blackberry in the hedges; the three kittens, grown big and fat, sit

cleaning themselves on the sunny verandah steps; the Man of Wrath

shoots partridges across the distant stubble; and the summer seems as

though it would dream on for ever. It is hard to believe that in three

months we shall probably be snowed up and certainly be cold. There is a

feeling about this month that reminds me of March and the early days of

April, when spring is still hesitating on the threshold and the garden

holds its breath in expectation. There is the same mildness in the air,

and the sky and grass have the same look as then; but the leaves tell a

different tale, and the reddening creeper on the house is rapidly

approaching its last and loveliest glory.

My roses have behaved as well on the whole as was to be expected, and

the Viscountess Folkestones and Laurette Messimys have been most

beautiful, the latter being quite the loveliest things in the garden,

each flower an exquisite loose cluster of coral-pink petals, paling at

the base to a yellow-white. I have ordered a hundred standard tea-roses

for planting next month, half of which are Viscountess Folkestones,

because the tea-roses have such a way of hanging their little heads

that one has to kneel down to be able to see them well in the dwarf

forms—not but what I entirely approve of kneeling before such perfect

beauty, only it dirties one’s clothes. So I am going to put standards

down each side of the walk under the south windows, and shall have the

flowers on a convenient level for worship. My only fear is, that they

will stand the winter less well than the dwarf sorts, being so

difficult to pack up snugly. The Persian Yellows and Bicolors have

been, as I predicted, a mistake among the tea-roses; they only flower

twice in the season and all the rest of the time look dull and moping;

and then the Persian Yellows have such an odd smell and so many insects

inside them eating them up. I have ordered Safrano tea-roses to put in

their place, as they all come out next month and are to be grouped in

the grass; and the semicircle being immediately under the windows,

besides having the best position in the place, must be reserved solely

for my choicest treasures. I have had a great many disappointments, but

feel as though I were really beginning to learn. Humility, and the most

patient perseverance, seem almost as necessary in gardening as rain and

sunshine, and every failure must be used as a stepping-stone to

something better.

I had a visitor last week who knows a great deal about gardening and

has had much practical experience. When I heard he was coming, I felt I

wanted to put my arms right round my garden and hide it from him; but

what was my surprise and delight when he said, after having gone all

over it, “Well, I think you have done wonders.” Dear me, how pleased I

was! It was so entirely unexpected, and such a complete novelty after

the remarks I have been listening to all the summer. I could have

hugged that discerning and indulgent critic, able to look beyond the

result to the intention, and appreciating the difficulties of every

kind that had been in the way. After that I opened my heart to him, and

listened reverently to all he had to say, and treasured up his kind and

encouraging advice, and wished he could stay here a whole year and help

me through the seasons. But he went, as people one likes always do go,

and he was the only guest I have had whose departure made me sorry.

The people I love are always somewhere else and not able to come to me,

while I can at any time fill the house with visitors about whom I know

little and care less. Perhaps, if I saw more of those absent ones, I

would not love them so well—at least, that is what I think on wet days

when the wind is howling round the house and all nature is overcome

with grief; and it has actually happened once or twice when great

friends have been staying with me that I have wished, when they left, I

might not see them again for at least ten years. I suppose the fact is,

that no friendship can stand the breakfast test, and here, in the

country, we invariably think it our duty to appear at breakfast.

Civilisation has done away with curl-papers, yet at that hour the soul

of the _Hausfrau_ is as tightly screwed up in them as was ever her

grandmother’s hair; and though my body comes down mechanically, having

been trained that way by punctual parents, my soul never thinks of

beginning to wake up for other people till lunch-time, and never does

so completely till it has been taken out of doors and aired in the

sunshine. Who can begin conventional amiability the first thing in the

morning? It is the hour of savage instincts and natural tendencies; it

is the triumph of the Disagreeable and the Cross. I am convinced that

the Muses and the Graces never thought of having breakfast anywhere but

in bed.

_November_ 11_th_.—When the gray November weather came, and hung its

soft dark clouds low and unbroken over the brown of the ploughed fields

and the vivid emerald of the stretches of winter corn, the heavy

stillness weighed my heart down to a forlorn yearning after the

pleasant things of childhood, the petting, the comforting, the warming

faith in the unfailing wisdom of elders. A great need of something to

lean on, and a great weariness of independence and responsibility took

possession of my soul; and looking round for support and comfort in

that transitory mood, the emptiness of the present and the blankness of

the future sent me back to the past with all its ghosts. Why should I

not go and see the place where I was born, and where I lived so long;

the place where I was so magnificently happy, so exquisitely wretched,

so close to heaven, so near to hell, always either up on a cloud of

glory, or down in the depths with the waters of despair closing over my

head? Cousins live in it now, distant cousins, loved with the exact

measure of love usually bestowed on cousins who reign in one’s stead;

cousins of practical views, who have dug up the flower-beds and planted

cabbages where roses grew; and though through all the years since my

father’s death I have held my head so high that it hurt, and loftily

refused to listen to their repeated suggestions that I should revisit

my old home, something in the sad listlessness of the November days

sent my spirit back to old times with a persistency that would not be

set aside, and I woke from my musings surprised to find myself sick

with longing. It is foolish but natural to quarrel with one’s cousins,

and especially foolish and natural when they have done nothing, and are

mere victims of chance. Is it their fault that my not being a boy

placed the shoes I should otherwise have stepped into at their

disposal? I know it is not; but their blamelessness does not make me

love them more. “_Noch ein dummes Frauenzimmer!_” cried my father, on

my arrival into the world—he had three of them already, and I was his

last hope,—and a _dummes Frauenzimmer_ I have remained ever since; and

that is why for years I would have no dealings with the cousins in

possession, and that is why, the other day, overcome by the tender

influence of the weather, the purely sentimental longing to join hands

again with my childhood was enough to send all my pride to the winds,

and to start me off without warning and without invitation on my

pilgrimage.

I have always had a liking for pilgrimages, and if I had lived in the

Middle Ages would have spent most of my time on the way to Rome. The

pilgrims, leaving all their cares at home, the anxieties of their

riches or their debts, the wife that worried and the children that

disturbed, took only their sins with them, and turning their backs on

their obligations, set out with that sole burden, and perhaps a

cheerful heart. How cheerful my heart would have been, starting on a

fine morning, with the smell of the spring in my nostrils, fortified by

the approval of those left behind, accompanied by the pious blessings

of my family, with every step getting farther from the suffocation of

daily duties, out into the wide fresh world, out into the glorious free

world, so poor, so penitent, and so happy! My dream, even now, is to

walk for weeks with some friend that I love, leisurely wandering from

place to place, with no route arranged and no object in view, with

liberty to go on all day or to linger all day, as we choose; but the

question of luggage, unknown to the simple pilgrim, is one of the rocks

on which my plans have been shipwrecked, and the other is the certain

censure of relatives, who, not fond of walking themselves, and having

no taste for noonday naps under hedges, would be sure to paralyse my

plans before they had grown to maturity by the honest horror of their

cry, “How very unpleasant if you were to meet any one you know!” The

relative of five hundred years back would simply have said, “How holy!”

My father had the same liking for pilgrimages—indeed, it is evident

that I have it from him—and he encouraged it in me when I was little,

taking me with him on his pious journeys to places he had lived in as a

boy. Often have we been together to the school he was at in

Brandenburg, and spent pleasant days wandering about the old town on

the edge of one of those lakes that lie in a chain in that wide green

plain; and often have we been in Potsdam, where he was quartered as a

lieutenant, the Potsdam pilgrimage including hours in the woods around

and in the gardens of Sans Souci, with the second volume of Carlyle’s

Frederick under my father’s arm; and often did we spend long summer

days at the house in the Mark, at the head of the same blue chain of

lakes, where his mother spent her young years, and where, though it

belonged to cousins, like everything else that was worth having, we

could wander about as we chose, for it was empty, and sit in the deep

windows of rooms where there was no furniture, and the painted Venuses

and cupids on the ceiling still smiled irrelevantly and stretched their

futile wreaths above the emptiness beneath. And while we sat and

rested, my father told me, as my grandmother had a hundred times told

him, all that had happened in those rooms in the far-off days when

people danced and sang and laughed through life, and nobody seemed ever

to be old or sorry.

There was, and still is, an inn within a stone’s throw of the great

iron gates, with two very old lime trees in front of it, where we used

to lunch on our arrival at a little table spread with a red and blue

check cloth, the lime blossoms dropping into our soup, and the bees

humming in the scented shadows overhead. I have a picture of the house

by my side as I write, done from the lake in old times, with a boat

full of ladies in hoops and powder in the foreground, and a youth

playing a guitar. The pilgrimages to this place were those I loved the

best.

But the stories my father told me, sometimes odd enough stories to tell

a little girl, as we wandered about the echoing rooms, or hung over the

stone balustrade and fed the fishes in the lake, or picked the pale

dog-roses in the hedges, or lay in the boat in a shady reed-grown bay

while he smoked to keep the mosquitoes off, were after all only

traditions, imparted to me in small doses from time to time, when his

earnest desire not to raise his remarks above the level of dulness

supposed to be wholesome for _Backfische_ was neutralised by an impulse

to share his thoughts with somebody who would laugh; whereas the place

I was bound for on my latest pilgrimage was filled with living,

first-hand memories of all the enchanted years that lie between two and

eighteen. How enchanted those years are is made more and more clear to

me the older I grow. There has been nothing in the least like them

since; and though I have forgotten most of what happened six months

ago, every incident, almost every day of those wonderful long years is

perfectly distinct in my memory.

But I had been stiffnecked, proud, unpleasant, altogether cousinly in

my behaviour towards the people in possession. The invitations to

revisit the old home had ceased. The cousins had grown tired of

refusals, and had left me alone. I did not even know who lived in it

now, it was so long since I had had any news. For two days I fought

against the strong desire to go there that had suddenly seized me, and

assured myself that I would not go, that it would be absurd to go,

undignified, sentimental, and silly, that I did not know them and would

be in an awkward position, and that I was old enough to know better.

But who can foretell from one hour to the next what a woman will do?

And when does she ever know better? On the third morning I set out as

hopefully as though it were the most natural thing in the world to fall

unexpectedly upon hitherto consistently neglected cousins, and expect

to be received with open arms.

It was a complicated journey, and lasted several hours. During the

first part, when it was still dark, I glowed with enthusiasm, with the

spirit of adventure, with delight at the prospect of so soon seeing the

loved place again; and thought with wonder of the long years I had

allowed to pass since last I was there. Of what I should say to the

cousins, and of how I should introduce myself into their midst, I did

not think at all: the pilgrim spirit was upon me, the unpractical

spirit that takes no thought for anything, but simply wanders along

enjoying its own emotions. It was a quiet, sad morning, and there was a

thick mist. By the time I was in the little train on the light railway

that passed through the village nearest my old home, I had got over my

first enthusiasm, and had entered the stage of critically examining the

changes that had been made in the last ten years. It was so misty that

I could see nothing of the familiar country from the carriage windows,

only the ghosts of pines in the front row of the forests; but the

railway itself was a new departure, unknown in our day, when we used to

drive over ten miles of deep, sandy forest roads to and from the

station, and although most people would have called it an evident and

great improvement, it was an innovation due, no doubt, to the zeal and

energy of the reigning cousin; and who was he, thought I, that he

should require more conveniences than my father had found needful? It

was no use my telling myself that in my father’s time the era of light

railways had not dawned, and that if it had, we should have done our

utmost to secure one; the thought of my cousin, stepping into my shoes,

and then altering them, was odious to me. By the time I was walking up

the hill from the station I had got over this feeling too, and had

entered a third stage of wondering uneasily what in the world I should

do next. Where was the intrepid courage with which I had started? At

the top of the first hill I sat down to consider this question in

detail, for I was very near the house now, and felt I wanted time.

Where, indeed, was the courage and joy of the morning? It had vanished

so completely that I could only suppose that it must be lunch time, the

observations of years having led to the discovery that the higher

sentiments and virtues fly affrighted on the approach of lunch, and

none fly quicker than courage. So I ate the lunch I had brought with

me, hoping that it was what I wanted; but it was chilly, made up of

sandwiches and pears, and it had to be eaten under a tree at the edge

of a field; and it was November, and the mist was thicker than ever and

very wet—the grass was wet with it, the gaunt tree was wet with it, I

was wet with it, and the sandwiches were wet with it. Nobody’s spirits

can keep up under such conditions; and as I ate the soaked sandwiches,

I deplored the headlong courage more with each mouthful that had torn

me from a warm, dry home where I was appreciated, and had brought me

first to the damp tree in the damp field, and when I had finished my

lunch and dessert of cold pears, was going to drag me into the midst of

a circle of unprepared and astonished cousins. Vast sheep loomed

through the mist a few yards off. The sheep dog kept up a perpetual,

irritating yap. In the fog I could hardly tell where I was, though I

knew I must have played there a hundred times as a child. After the

fashion of woman directly she is not perfectly warm and perfectly

comfortable, I began to consider the uncertainty of human life, and to

shake my head in gloomy approval as lugubrious lines of pessimistic

poetry suggested themselves to my mind.

Now it is clearly a desirable plan, if you want to do anything, to do

it in the way consecrated by custom, more especially if you are a

woman. The rattle of a carriage along the road just behind me, and the

fact that I started and turned suddenly hot, drove this truth home to

my soul. The mist hid me, and the carriage, no doubt full of cousins,

drove on in the direction of the house; but what an absurd position I

was in! Suppose the kindly mist had lifted, and revealed me lunching in

the wet on their property, the cousin of the short and lofty letters,

the _unangenehme Elisabeth!_ “_Die war doch immer verdreht_,” I could

imagine them hastily muttering to each other, before advancing wreathed

in welcoming smiles. It gave me a great shock, this narrow escape, and

I got on to my feet quickly, and burying the remains of my lunch under

the gigantic molehill on which I had been sitting, asked myself

nervously what I proposed to do next. Should I walk back to the

village, go to the _Gasthof_, write a letter craving permission to call

on my cousins, and wait there till an answer came? It would be a

discreet and sober course to pursue; the next best thing to having

written before leaving home. But the _Gasthof_ of a north German

village is a dreadful place, and the remembrance of one in which I had

taken refuge once from a thunderstorm was still so vivid that nature

itself cried out against this plan. The mist, if anything, was growing

denser. I knew every path and gate in the place. What if I gave up all

hope of seeing the house, and went through the little door in the wall

at the bottom of the garden, and confined myself for this once to that?

In such weather I would be able to wander round as I pleased, without

the least risk of being seen by or meeting any cousins, and it was

after all the garden that lay nearest my heart. What a delight it would

be to creep into it unobserved, and revisit all the corners I so well

remembered, and slip out again and get away safely without any need of

explanations, assurances, protestations, displays of affection, without

any need, in a word, of that exhausting form of conversation, so dear

to relations, known as _Redensarten!_

The mist tempted me. I think if it had been a fine day I would have

gone soberly to the _Gasthof_ and written the conciliatory letter; but

the temptation was too great, it was altogether irresistible, and in

ten minutes I had found the gate, opened it with some difficulty, and

was standing with a beating heart in the garden of my childhood.

Now I wonder whether I shall ever again feel thrills of the same

potency as those that ran through me at that moment. First of all I was

trespassing, which is in itself thrilling; but how much more thrilling

when you are trespassing on what might just as well have been your own

ground, on what actually was for years your own ground, and when you

are in deadly peril of seeing the rightful owners, whom you have never

met, but with whom you have quarrelled, appear round the corner, and of

hearing them remark with an inquiring and awful politeness “I do not

think I have the pleasure—?” Then the place was unchanged. I was

standing in the same mysterious tangle of damp little paths that had

always been just there; they curled away on either side among the

shrubs, with the brown tracks of recent footsteps in the centre of

their green stains, just as they did in my day. The overgrown lilac

bushes still met above my head. The moisture dripped from the same

ledge in the wall on to the sodden leaves beneath, as it had done all

through the afternoons of all those past Novembers. This was the place,

this damp and gloomy tangle, that had specially belonged to me. Nobody

ever came to it, for in winter it was too dreary, and in summer so full

of mosquitoes that only a _Backfisch_ indifferent to spots could have

borne it. But it was a place where I could play unobserved, and where I

could walk up and down uninterrupted for hours, building castles in the

air. There was an unwholesome little arbour in one dark corner, much

frequented by the larger black slug, where I used to pass glorious

afternoons making plans. I was for ever making plans, and if nothing

came of them, what did it matter? The mere making had been a joy. To me

this out-of-the-way corner was always a wonderful and a mysterious

place, where my castles in the air stood close together in radiant

rows, and where the strangest and most splendid adventures befell me;

for the hours I passed in it and the people I met in it were all

enchanted.

Standing there and looking round with happy eyes, I forgot the

existence of the cousins. I could have cried for joy at being there

again. It was the home of my fathers, the home that would have been

mine if I had been a boy, the home that was mine now by a thousand

tender and happy and miserable associations, of which the people in

possession could not dream. They were tenants, but it was my home. I

threw my arms round the trunk of a very wet fir tree, every branch of

which I remembered, for had I not climbed it, and fallen from it, and

torn and bruised myself on it uncountable numbers of times? and I gave

it such a hearty kiss that my nose and chin were smudged into one green

stain, and still I did not care. Far from caring, it filled me with a

reckless, _Backfisch_ pleasure in being dirty, a delicious feeling that

I had not had for years. Alice in Wonderland, after she had drunk the

contents of the magic bottle, could not have grown smaller more

suddenly than I grew younger the moment I passed through that magic

door. Bad habits cling to us, however, with such persistency that I did

mechanically pull out my handkerchief and begin to rub off the

welcoming smudge, a thing I never would have dreamed of doing in the

glorious old days; but an artful scent of violets clinging to the

handkerchief brought me to my senses, and with a sudden impulse of

scorn, the fine scorn for scent of every honest _Backfisch_, I rolled

it up into a ball and flung it away into the bushes, where I daresay it

is at this moment. “Away with you,” I cried, “away with you, symbol of

conventionality, of slavery, of pandering to a desire to please—away

with you, miserable little lace-edged rag!” And so young had I grown

within the last few minutes that I did not even feel silly.

As a _Backfisch_ I had never used handkerchiefs—the child of nature

scorns to blow its nose—though for decency’s sake my governess insisted

on giving me a clean one of vast size and stubborn texture on Sundays.

It was stowed away unfolded in the remotest corner of my pocket, where

it was gradually pressed into a beautiful compactness by the other

contents, which were knives. After a while, I remember, the

handkerchief being brought to light on Sundays to make room for a

successor, and being manifestly perfectly clean, we came to an

agreement that it should only be changed on the first and third Sundays

in the month, on condition that I promised to turn it on the other

Sundays. My governess said that the outer folds became soiled from the

mere contact with the other things in my pocket, and that visitors

might catch sight of the soiled side if it was never turned when I

wished to blow my nose in their presence, and that one had no right to

give one’s visitors shocks. “But I never do wish——” I began with great

earnestness. “_Unsinn_,” said my governess, cutting me short.

After the first thrills of joy at being there again had gone, the

profound stillness of the dripping little shrubbery frightened me. It

was so still that I was afraid to move; so still, that I could count

each drop of moisture falling from the oozing wall; so still, that when

I held my breath to listen, I was deafened by my own heart-beats. I

made a step forward in the direction where the arbour ought to be, and

the rustling and jingling of my clothes terrified me into immobility.

The house was only two hundred yards off; and if any one had been

about, the noise I had already made opening the creaking door and so

foolishly apostrophising my handkerchief must have been noticed.

Suppose an inquiring gardener, or a restless cousin, should presently

loom through the fog, bearing down upon me? Suppose Fräulein

Wundermacher should pounce upon me suddenly from behind, coming up

noiselessly in her galoshes, and shatter my castles with her customary

triumphant “_Jetzt halte ich dich aber fest!_” Why, what was I thinking

of? Fräulein Wundermacher, so big and masterful, such an enemy of

day-dreams, such a friend of _das Praktische_, such a lover of creature

comforts, had died long ago, had been succeeded long ago by others,

German sometimes, and sometimes English, and sometimes at intervals

French, and they too had all in their turn vanished, and I was here a

solitary ghost. “Come, Elizabeth,” said I to myself impatiently, “are

you actually growing sentimental over your governesses? If you think

you are a ghost, be glad at least that you are a solitary one. Would

you like the ghosts of all those poor women you tormented to rise up

now in this gloomy place against you? And do you intend to stand here

till you are caught?” And thus exhorting myself to action, and

recognising how great was the risk I ran in lingering, I started down

the little path leading to the arbour and the principal part of the

garden, going, it is true, on tiptoe, and very much frightened by the

rustling of my petticoats, but determined to see what I had come to see

and not to be scared away by phantoms.

How regretfully did I think at that moment of the petticoats of my

youth, so short, so silent, and so woollen! And how convenient the

canvas shoes were with the india rubber soles, for creeping about

without making a sound! Thanks to them I could always run swiftly and

unheard into my hiding-places, and stay there listening to the garden

resounding with cries of “Elizabeth! Elizabeth! Come in at once to your

lessons!” Or, at a different period, “_Où êtes-vous donc, petite

sotte?_” Or at yet another period, “_Warte nur, wenn ich dich erst

habe!_” As the voices came round one corner, I whisked in my noiseless

clothes round the next, and it was only Fräulein Wundermacher, a person

of resource, who discovered that all she needed for my successful

circumvention was galoshes. She purchased a pair, wasted no breath

calling me, and would come up silently, as I stood lapped in a false

security lost in the contemplation of a squirrel or a robin, and seize

me by the shoulders from behind, to the grievous unhinging of my

nerves. Stealing along in the fog, I looked back uneasily once or

twice, so vivid was this disquieting memory, and could hardly be

reassured by putting up my hand to the elaborate twists and curls that

compose what my maid calls my _Frisur_, and that mark the gulf lying

between the present and the past; for it had happened once or twice,

awful to relate and to remember, that Fräulein Wundermacher, sooner

than let me slip through her fingers, had actually caught me by the

long plait of hair to whose other end I was attached and whose English

name I had been told was pigtail, just at the instant when I was

springing away from her into the bushes; and so had led me home

triumphant, holding on tight to the rope of hair, and muttering with a

broad smile of special satisfaction, “_Diesmal wirst du mir aber nicht

entschlüpfen!_” Fräulein Wundermacher, now I came to think of it, must

have been a humourist. She was certainly a clever and a capable woman.

But I wished at that moment that she would not haunt me so

persistently, and that I could get rid of the feeling that she was just

behind in her galoshes, with her hand stretched out to seize me.

Passing the arbour, and peering into its damp recesses, I started back

with my heart in my mouth. I thought I saw my grandfather’s stern eyes

shining in the darkness. It was evident that my anxiety lest the

cousins should catch me had quite upset my nerves, for I am not by

nature inclined to see eyes where eyes are not. “Don’t be foolish,

Elizabeth,” murmured my soul in rather a faint voice, “go in, and make

sure.” “But I don’t like going in and making sure,” I replied. I did go

in, however, with a sufficient show of courage, and fortunately the

eyes vanished. What I should have done if they had not I am altogether

unable to imagine. Ghosts are things that I laugh at in the daytime and

fear at night, but I think if I were to meet one I should die. The

arbour had fallen into great decay, and was in the last stage of

mouldiness. My grandfather had had it made, and, like other buildings,

it enjoyed a period of prosperity before being left to the ravages of

slugs and children, when he came down every afternoon in summer and

drank his coffee there and read his _Kreuzzeitung_ and dozed, while the

rest of us went about on tiptoe, and only the birds dared sing. Even

the mosquitoes that infested the place were too much in awe of him to

sting him; they certainly never did sting him, and I naturally

concluded it must be because he had forbidden such familiarities.

Although I had played there for so many years since his death, my

memory skipped them all, and went back to the days when it was

exclusively his. Standing on the spot where his armchair used to be, I

felt how well I knew him now from the impressions he made then on my

child’s mind, though I was not conscious of them for more than twenty

years. Nobody told me about him, and he died when I was six, and yet

within the last year or two, that strange Indian summer of remembrance

that comes to us in the leisured times when the children have been born

and we have time to think, has made me know him perfectly well. It is

rather an uncomfortable thought for the grown-up, and especially for

the parent, but of a salutary and restraining nature, that though

children may not understand what is said and done before them, and have

no interest in it at the time, and though they may forget it at once

and for years, yet these things that they have seen and heard and not

noticed have after all impressed themselves for ever on their minds,

and when they are men and women come crowding back with surprising and

often painful distinctness, and away frisk all the cherished little

illusions in flocks.

I had an awful reverence for my grandfather. He never petted, and he

often frowned, and such people are generally reverenced. Besides, he

was a just man, everybody said; a just man who might have been a great

man if he had chosen, and risen to almost any pinnacle of worldly

glory. That he had not so chosen was held to be a convincing proof of

his greatness; for he was plainly too great to be great in the vulgar

sense, and shrouded himself in the dignity of privacy and

potentialities. This, at least, as time passed and he still did

nothing, was the belief of the simple people around. People must

believe in somebody, and having pinned their faith on my grandfather in

the promising years that lie round thirty, it was more convenient to

let it remain there. He pervaded our family life till my sixth year,

and saw to it that we all behaved ourselves, and then he died, and we

were glad that he should be in heaven. He was a good German (and when

Germans are good they are very good) who kept the commandments, voted

for the Government, grew prize potatoes and bred innumerable sheep,

drove to Berlin once a year with the wool in a procession of waggons

behind him and sold it at the annual Wollmarkt, rioted soberly for a

few days there, and then carried most of the proceeds home, hunted as

often as possible, helped his friends, punished his children, read his

Bible, said his prayers, and was genuinely astonished when his wife had

the affectation to die of a broken heart. I cannot pretend to explain

this conduct. She ought, of course, to have been happy in the

possession of so good a man; but good men are sometimes oppressive, and

to have one in the house with you and to live in the daily glare of his

goodness must be a tremendous business. After bearing him seven sons

and three daughters, therefore, my grandmother died in the way

described, and afforded, said my grandfather, another and a very

curious proof of the impossibility of ever being sure of your ground

with women. The incident faded more quickly from his mind than it might

otherwise have done for its having occurred simultaneously with the

production of a new kind of potato, of which he was justly proud. He

called it _Trost in Trauer_, and quoted the text of Scripture _Auge um

Auge, Zabn um Zahn_, after which he did not again allude to his wife’s

decease. In his last years, when my father managed the estate, and he

only lived with us and criticised, he came to have the reputation of an

oracle. The neighbours sent him their sons at the beginning of any

important phase in their lives, and he received them in this very

arbour, administering eloquent and minute advice in the deep voice that

rolled round the shrubbery and filled me with a vague sense of guilt as

I played. Sitting among the bushes playing muffled games for fear of

disturbing him, I supposed he must be reading aloud, so unbroken was

the monotony of that majestic roll. The young men used to come out

again bathed in perspiration, much stung by mosquitoes, and looking

bewildered; and when they had got over the impression made by my

grandfather’s speech and presence, no doubt forgot all he had said with

wholesome quickness, and set themselves to the interesting and

necessary work of gaining their own experience. Once, indeed, a

dreadful thing happened, whose immediate consequence was the abrupt end

to the long and close friendship between us and our nearest neighbour.

His son was brought to the arbour and left there in the usual way, and

either he must have happened on the critical half hour after the coffee

and before the _Kreuzzeitung_, when my grandfather was accustomed to

sleep, or he was more courageous than the others and tried to talk, for

very shortly, playing as usual near at hand, I heard my grandfather’s

voice, raised to an extent that made me stop in my game and quake,

saying with deliberate anger, “_Hebe dich weg von mir, Sohn des

Satans!_” Which was all the advice this particular young man got, and

which he hastened to take, for out he came through the bushes, and

though his face was very pale, there was an odd twist about the corners

of his mouth that reassured me.

This must have happened quite at the end of my grandfather’s life, for

almost immediately afterwards, as it now seems to me, he died before he

need have done because he would eat crab, a dish that never agreed with

him, in the face of his doctor’s warning that if he did he would surely

die. “What! am I to be conquered by crabs?” he demanded indignantly of

the doctor; for apart from loving them with all his heart he had never

yet been conquered by anything. “Nay, sir, the combat is too unequal—do

not, I pray you, try it again,” replied the doctor. But my grandfather

ordered crabs that very night for supper, and went in to table with the

shining eyes of one who is determined to conquer or die, and the crabs

conquered, and he died. “He was a just man,” said the neighbours,

except that nearest neighbour, formerly his best friend, “and might

have been a great one had he so chosen.” And they buried him with

profound respect, and the sunshine came into our home life with a

burst, and the birds were not the only creatures that sang, and the

arbour, from having been a temple of Delphic utterances, sank into a

home for slugs.

Musing on the strangeness of life, and on the invariable ultimate

triumph of the insignificant and small over the important and vast,

illustrated in this instance by the easy substitution in the arbour of

slugs for grandfathers, I went slowly round the next bend of the path,

and came to the broad walk along the south side of the high wall

dividing the flower garden from the kitchen garden, in which sheltered

position my father had had his choicest flowers. Here the cousins had

been at work, and all the climbing roses that clothed the wall with

beauty were gone, and some very neat fruit trees, tidily nailed up at

proper intervals, reigned in their stead. Evidently the cousins knew

the value of this warm aspect, for in the border beneath, filled in my

father’s time in this month of November with the wallflowers that were

to perfume the walk in spring, there was a thick crop of—I stooped down

close to make sure—yes, a thick crop of radishes. My eyes filled with

tears at the sight of those radishes, and it is probably the only

occasion on record on which radishes have made anybody cry. My dear

father, whom I so passionately loved, had in his turn passionately

loved this particular border, and spent the spare moments of a busy

life enjoying the flowers that grew in it. He had no time himself for a

more near acquaintance with the delights of gardening than directing

what plants were to be used, but found rest from his daily work

strolling up and down here, or sitting smoking as close to the flowers

as possible. “It is the Purest of Humane pleasures, it is the Greatest

Refreshment to the Spirits of Man,” he would quote (for he read other

things besides the _Kreuzzeitung_), looking round with satisfaction on

reaching this fragrant haven after a hot day in the fields. Well, the

cousins did not think so. Less fanciful, and more sensible as they

probably would have said, their position plainly was that you cannot

eat flowers. Their spirits required no refreshment, but their bodies

needed much, and therefore radishes were more precious than

wallflowers. Nor was my youth wholly destitute of radishes, but they

were grown in the decent obscurity of odd kitchen garden corners and

old cucumber frames, and would never have been allowed to come among

the flowers. And only because I was not a boy here they were profaning

the ground that used to be so beautiful. Oh, it was a terrible

misfortune not to have been a boy! And how sad and lonely it was, after

all, in this ghostly garden. The radish bed and what it symbolised had

turned my first joy into grief. This walk and border me too much of my

father reminded, and of all he had been to me. What I knew of good he

had taught me, and what I had of happiness was through him. Only once

during all the years we lived together had we been of different

opinions and fallen out, and it was the one time I ever saw him severe.

I was four years old, and demanded one Sunday to be taken to church. My

father said no, for I had never been to church, and the German service

is long and exhausting. I implored. He again said no. I implored again,

and showed such a pious disposition, and so earnest a determination to

behave well, that he gave in, and we went off very happily hand in

hand. “Now mind, Elizabeth,” he said, turning to me at the church door,

“there is no coming out again in the middle. Having insisted on being

brought, thou shalt now sit patiently till the end.” “Oh, yes, oh,

yes,” I promised eagerly, and went in filled with holy fire. The

shortness of my legs, hanging helplessly for two hours midway between

the seat and the floor, was the weapon chosen by Satan for my

destruction. In German churches you do not kneel, and seldom stand, but

sit nearly the whole time, praying and singing in great comfort. If you

are four years old, however, this unchanged position soon becomes one

of torture. Unknown and dreadful things go on in your legs, strange

prickings and tinglings and dartings up and down, a sudden terrifying

numbness, when you think they must have dropped off but are afraid to

look, then renewed and fiercer prickings, shootings, and burnings. I

thought I must be very ill, for I had never known my legs like that

before. My father sitting beside me was engrossed in the singing of a

chorale that evidently had no end, each verse finished with a

long-drawn-out hallelujah, after which the organ played by itself for a

hundred years—by the organist’s watch, which was wrong, two minutes

exactly—and then another verse began. My father, being the patron of

the living, was careful to sing and pray and listen to the sermon with

exemplary attention, aware that every eye in the little church was on

our pew, and at first I tried to imitate him; but the behaviour of my

legs became so alarming that after vainly casting imploring glances at

him and seeing that he continued his singing unmoved, I put out my hand

and pulled his sleeve.

“Hal-le-lu-jah,” sang my father with deliberation; continuing in a low

voice without changing the expression of his face, his lips hardly

moving, and his eyes fixed abstractedly on the ceiling till the

organist, who was also the postman, should have finished his solo, “Did

I not tell thee to sit still, Elizabeth?” “Yes, but——” “Then do it.”

“But I want to go home.”

“_Unsinn_.” And the next verse beginning, my father sang louder than

ever. What could I do? Should I cry? I began to be afraid I was going

to die on that chair, so extraordinary were the sensations in my legs.

What could my father do to me if I did cry? With the quick instinct of

small children I felt that he could not put me in the corner in church,

nor would he whip me in public, and that with the whole village looking

on, he was helpless, and would have to give in. Therefore I tugged his

sleeve again and more peremptorily, and prepared to demand my immediate

removal in a loud voice. But my father was ready for me. Without

interrupting his singing, or altering his devout expression, he put his

hand slowly down and gave me a hard pinch—not a playful pinch, but a

good hard unmistakeable pinch, such as I had never imagined possible,

and then went on serenely to the next hallelujah. For a moment I was

petrified with astonishment. Was this my indulgent father, my playmate,

adorer, and friend? Smarting with pain, for I was a round baby, with a

nicely stretched, tight skin, and dreadfully hurt in my feelings, I

opened my mouth to shriek in earnest, when my father’s clear whisper

fell on my ear, each word distinct and not to be misunderstood, his

eyes as before gazing meditatively into space, and his lips hardly

moving, “_Elizabeth, wenn du schreist, kneife ich dich bis du platzt_.”

And he finished the verse with unruffled decorum—

“Will Satan mich verschlingen,

So lass die Engel singen

Hallelujah!”

We never had another difference. Up to then he had been my willing

slave, and after that I was his.

With a smile and a shiver I turned from the border and its memories to

the door in the wall leading to the kitchen garden, in a corner of

which my own little garden used to be. The door was open, and I stood

still a moment before going through, to hold my breath and listen. The

silence was as profound as before. The place seemed deserted; and I

should have thought the house empty and shut up but for the carefully

tended radishes and the recent footmarks on the green of the path. They

were the footmarks of a child. I was stooping down to examine a

specially clear one, when the loud caw of a very bored looking crow

sitting on the wall just above my head made me jump as I have seldom in

my life jumped, and reminded me that I was trespassing. Clearly my

nerves were all to pieces, for I gathered up my skirts and fled through

the door as though a whole army of ghosts and cousins were at my heels,

nor did I stop till I had reached the remote corner where my garden

was. “Are you enjoying yourself, Elizabeth?” asked the mocking sprite

that calls itself my soul: but I was too much out of breath to answer.

This was really a very safe corner. It was separated from the main

garden and the house by the wall, and shut in on the north side by an

orchard, and it was to the last degree unlikely that any one would come

there on such an afternoon. This plot of ground, turned now as I saw

into a rockery, had been the scene of my most untiring labours. Into

the cold earth of this north border on which the sun never shone I had

dug my brightest hopes. All my pocket money had been spent on it, and

as bulbs were dear and my weekly allowance small, in a fatal hour I had

borrowed from Fräulein Wundermacher, selling her my independence,

passing utterly into her power, forced as a result till my next

birthday should come round to an unnatural suavity of speech and manner

in her company, against which my very soul revolted. And after all,

nothing came up. The labour of digging and watering, the anxious zeal

with which I pounced on weeds, the poring over gardening books, the

plans made as I sat on the little seat in the middle gazing admiringly

and with the eye of faith on the trim surface so soon to be gemmed with

a thousand flowers, the reckless expenditure of _pfennings_, the

humiliation of my position in regard to Fräulein Wundermacher,—all, all

had been in vain. No sun shone there, and nothing grew. The gardener

who reigned supreme in those days had given me this big piece for that

sole reason, because he could do nothing with it himself. He was no

doubt of opinion that it was quite good enough for a child to

experiment upon, and went his way, when I had thanked him with a

profuseness of gratitude I still remember, with an unmoved countenance.

For more than a year I worked and waited, and watched the career of the

flourishing orchard opposite with puzzled feelings. The orchard was

only a few yards away, and yet, although my garden was full of manure,

and water, and attentions that were never bestowed on the orchard, all

it could show and ever did show were a few unhappy beginnings of growth

that either remained stationary and did not achieve flowers, or

dwindled down again and vanished. Once I timidly asked the gardener if

he could explain these signs and wonders, but he was a busy man with no

time for answering questions, and told me shortly that gardening was

not learned in a day. How well I remember that afternoon, and the very

shape of the lazy clouds, and the smell of spring things, and myself

going away abashed and sitting on the shaky bench in my domain and

wondering for the hundredth time what it was that made the difference

between my bit and the bit of orchard in front of me. The fruit trees,

far enough away from the wall to be beyond the reach of its cold shade,

were tossing their flower-laden heads in the sunshine in a carelessly

well-satisfied fashion that filled my heart with envy. There was a rise

in the field behind them, and at the foot of its protecting slope they

luxuriated in the insolent glory of their white and pink perfection. It

was May, and my heart bled at the thought of the tulips I had put in in

November, and that I had never seen since. The whole of the rest of the

garden was on fire with tulips; behind me, on the other side of the

wall, were rows and rows of them,—cups of translucent loveliness, a

jewelled ring flung right round the lawn. But what was there not on the

other side of that wall? Things came up there and grew and flowered

exactly as my gardening books said they should do; and in front of me,

in the gay orchard, things that nobody ever troubled about or

cultivated or noticed throve joyously beneath the trees,—daffodils

thrusting their spears through the grass, crocuses peeping out

inquiringly, snowdrops uncovering their small cold faces when the first

shivering spring days came. Only my piece that I so loved was

perpetually ugly and empty. And I sat in it thinking of these things on

that radiant day, and wept aloud.

Then an apprentice came by, a youth who had often seen me busily

digging, and noticing the unusual tears, and struck perhaps by the

difference between my garden and the profusion of splendour all around,

paused with his barrow on the path in front of me, and remarked that

nobody could expect to get blood out of a stone. The apparent

irrelevance of this statement made me weep still louder, the bitter

tears of insulted sorrow; but he stuck to his point, and harangued me

from the path, explaining the connection between north walls and tulips

and blood and stones till my tears all dried up again and I listened

attentively, for the conclusion to be drawn from his remarks was

plainly that I had been shamefully taken in by the head gardener, who

was an unprincipled person thenceforward to be for ever mistrusted and

shunned. Standing on the path from which the kindly apprentice had

expounded his proverb, this scene rose before me as clearly as though

it had taken place that very day; but how different everything looked,

and how it had shrunk! Was this the wide orchard that had seemed to

stretch away, it and the sloping field beyond, up to the gates of

heaven? I believe nearly every child who is much alone goes through a

certain time of hourly expecting the Day of Judgment, and I had made up

my mind that on that Day the heavenly host would enter the world by

that very field, coming down the slope in shining ranks, treading the

daffodils under foot, filling the orchard with their songs of

exultation, joyously seeking out the sheep from among the goats. Of

course I was a sheep, and my governess and the head gardener goats, so

that the results could not fail to be in every way satisfactory. But

looking up at the slope and remembering my visions, I laughed at the

smallness of the field I had supposed would hold all heaven.

Here again the cousins had been at work. The site of my garden was

occupied by a rockery, and the orchard grass with all its treasures had

been dug up, and the spaces between the trees planted with currant

bushes and celery in admirable rows; so that no future little cousins

will be able to dream of celestial hosts coming towards them across the

fields of daffodils, and will perhaps be the better for being free from

visions of the kind, for as I grew older, uncomfortable doubts laid

hold of my heart with cold fingers, dim uncertainties as to the exact

ultimate position of the gardener and the governess, anxious

questionings as to how it would be if it were they who turned out after

all to be sheep, and I who—? For that we all three might be gathered

into the same fold at the last never, in those days, struck me as

possible, and if it had I should not have liked it.

“Now what sort of person can that be,” I asked myself, shaking my head,

as I contemplated the changes before me, “who could put a rockery among

vegetables and currant bushes? A rockery, of all things in the

gardening world, needs consummate tact in its treatment. It is easier

to make mistakes in forming a rockery than in any other garden scheme.

Either it is a great success, or it is great failure; either it is very

charming, or it is very absurd. There is no state between the sublime

and the ridiculous possible in a rockery.” I stood shaking my head

disapprovingly at the rockery before me, lost in these reflections,

when a sudden quick pattering of feet coming along in a great hurry

made me turn round with a start, just in time to receive the shock of a

body tumbling out of the mist and knocking violently against me.

It was a little girl of about twelve years old.

“Hullo!” said the little girl in excellent English; and then we stared

at each other in astonishment.

“I thought you were Miss Robinson,” said the little girl, offering no

apology for having nearly knocked me down. “Who are you?”

“Miss Robinson? Miss Robinson?” I repeated, my eyes fixed on the little

girl’s face, and a host of memories stirring within me. “Why, didn’t

she marry a missionary, and go out to some place where they ate him?”

The little girl stared harder. “Ate him? Marry? What, has she been

married all this time to somebody who’s been eaten and never let on?

Oh, I say, what a game!” And she threw back her head and laughed till

the garden rang again.

“O hush, you dreadful little girl!” I implored, catching her by the

arm, and terrified beyond measure by the loudness of her mirth. “Don’t

make that horrid noise—we are certain to be caught if you don’t stop——”

The little girl broke off a shriek of laughter in the middle and shut

her mouth with a snap. Her eyes, round and black and shiny like boot

buttons, came still further out of her head. “Caught?” she said

eagerly. “What, are you afraid of being caught too? Well, this _is_ a

game!” And with her hands plunged deep in the pockets of her coat she

capered in front of me in the excess of her enjoyment, reminding me of

a very fat black lamb frisking round the dazed and passive sheep its

mother.

It was clear that the time had come for me to get down to the gate at

the end of the garden as quickly as possible, and I began to move away

in that direction. The little girl at once stopped capering and planted

herself squarely in front of me. “Who are you?” she said, examining me

from my hat to my boots with the keenest interest.

I considered this ungarnished manner of asking questions impertinent,

and, trying to look lofty, made an attempt to pass at the side.

The little girl, with a quick, cork-like movement, was there before me.

“Who are you?” she repeated, her expression friendly but firm. “Oh,

I—I’m a pilgrim,” I said in desperation.

“A pilgrim!” echoed the little girl. She seemed struck, and while she

was struck I slipped past her and began to walk quickly towards the

door in the wall. “A pilgrim!” said the little girl, again, keeping

close beside me, and looking me up and down attentively. “I don’t like

pilgrims. Aren’t they people who are always walking about, and have

things the matter with their feet? Have you got anything the matter

with your feet?”

“Certainly not,” I replied indignantly, walking still faster.

“And they never wash, Miss Robinson says. You don’t either, do you?”

“Not wash? Oh, I’m afraid you are a very badly brought-up little

girl—oh, leave me alone—I must run—”

“So must I,” said the little girl, cheerfully, “for Miss Robinson must

be close behind us. She nearly had me just before I found you.” And she

started running by my side.

The thought of Miss Robinson close behind us gave wings to my feet,

and, casting my dignity, of which, indeed, there was but little left,

to the winds, I fairly flew down the path. The little girl was not to

be outrun, and though she panted and turned weird colours, kept by my

side and even talked. Oh, I was tired, tired in body and mind, tired by

the different shocks I had received, tired by the journey, tired by the

want of food; and here I was being forced to run because this very

naughty little girl chose to hide instead of going in to her lessons.

“I say—this is jolly—” she jerked out.

“But why need we run to the same place?” I breathlessly asked, in the

vain hope of getting rid of her.

“Oh, yes—that’s just—the fun. We’d get on—together—you and I—”

“No, no,” said I, decided on this point, bewildered though I was.

“I can’t stand washing—either—it’s awful—in winter—and makes one

have—chaps.”

“But I don’t mind it in the least,” I protested faintly, not having any

energy left.

“Oh, I say!” said the little girl, looking at my face, and making the

sound known as a guffaw. The familiarity of this little girl was wholly

revolting.

We had got safely through the door, round the corner past the radishes,

and were in the shrubbery. I knew from experience how easy it was to

hide in the tangle of little paths, and stopped a moment to look round

and listen. The little girl opened her mouth to speak. With great

presence of mind I instantly put my muff in front of it and held it

there tight, while I listened. Dead silence, except for the laboured

breathing and struggles of the little girl.

“I don’t hear a sound,” I whispered, letting her go again. “Now what

did you want to say?” I added, eyeing her severely.

“I wanted to say,” she panted, “that it’s no good pretending you wash

with a nose like that.”

“A nose like that! A nose like what?” I exclaimed, greatly offended;

and though I put up my hand and very tenderly and carefully felt it, I

could find no difference in it. “I am afraid poor Miss Robinson must

have a wretched life,” I said, in tones of deep disgust.

The little girl smiled fatuously, as though I were paying her

compliments. “It’s all green and brown,” she said, pointing. “Is it

always like that?”

Then I remembered the wet fir tree near the gate, and the enraptured

kiss it had received, and blushed.

“Won’t it come off?” persisted the little girl.

“Of course it will come off,” I answered, frowning.

“Why don’t you rub it off?”

Then I remembered the throwing away of the handkerchief, and blushed

again.

“Please lend me your handkerchief,” I said humbly, “I—I have lost

mine.”

There was a great fumbling in six different pockets, and then a

handkerchief that made me young again merely to look at it was

produced. I took it thankfully and rubbed with energy, the little girl,

intensely interested, watching the operation and giving me advice.

“There—it’s all right now—a little more on the right—there—now it’s all

off.”

“Are you sure? No green left?” I anxiously asked.

“No, it’s red all over now,” she replied cheerfully. “Let me get home,”

thought I, very much upset by this information, “let me get home to my

dear, uncritical, admiring babies, who accept my nose as an example of

what a nose should be, and whatever its colour think it beautiful.” And

thrusting the handkerchief back into the little girl’s hands, I hurried

away down the path. She packed it away hastily, but it took some

seconds for it was of the size of a small sheet, and then came running

after me. “Where are you going?” she asked surprised, as I turned down

the path leading to the gate.

“Through this gate,” I replied with decision.

“But you mustn’t—we’re not allowed to go through there——”

So strong was the force of old habits in that place that at the words

_not allowed_ my hand dropped of itself from the latch; and at that

instant a voice calling quite close to us through the mist struck me

rigid.

“Elizabeth! Elizabeth!” called the voice, “Come in at once to your

lessons—Elizabeth! Elizabeth!”

“It’s Miss Robinson,” whispered the little girl, twinkling with

excitement; then, catching sight of my face, she said once more with

eager insistence, “Who are you?”

“Oh, I’m a ghost!” I cried with conviction, pressing my hands to my

forehead and looking round fearfully.

“Pooh,” said the little girl.

It was the last remark I heard her make, for there was a creaking of

approaching boots in the bushes, and seized by a frightful panic I

pulled the gate open with one desperate pull, flung it to behind me,

and fled out and away down the wide, misty fields.

The _Gotha Almanach_ says that the reigning cousin married the daughter

of a Mr. Johnstone, an Englishman, in 1885, and that in 1886 their only

child was born, Elizabeth.

_November_ 20_th_.—Last night we had ten degrees of frost (Fahrenheit),

and I went out the first thing this morning to see what had become of

the tea-roses, and behold, they were wide awake and quite

cheerful—covered with rime it is true, but anything but black and

shrivelled. Even those in boxes on each side of the verandah steps were

perfectly alive and full of buds, and one in particular, a Bouquet

d’Or, is a mass of buds, and would flower if it could get the least

encouragement. I am beginning to think that the tenderness of tea-roses

is much exaggerated, and am certainly very glad I had the courage to

try them in this northern garden. But I must not fly too boldly in the

face of Providence, and have ordered those in the boxes to be taken

into the greenhouse for the winter, and hope the Bouquet d’Or, in a

sunny place near the glass, may be induced to open some of those buds.

The greenhouse is only used as a refuge, and kept at a temperature just

above freezing, and is reserved entirely for such plants as cannot

stand the very coldest part of the winter out of doors. I don’t use it

for growing anything, because I don’t love things that will only bear

the garden for three or four months in the year and require coaxing and

petting for the rest of it. Give me a garden full of strong, healthy

creatures, able to stand roughness and cold without dismally giving in

and dying. I never could see that delicacy of constitution is pretty,

either in plants or women. No doubt there are many lovely flowers to be

had by heat and constant coaxing, but then for each of these there are

fifty others still lovelier that will gratefully grow in God’s

wholesome air and are blessed in return with a far greater intensity of

scent and colour.

We have been very busy till now getting the permanent beds into order

and planting the new tea-roses, and I am looking forward to next summer

with more hope than ever in spite of my many failures. I wish the years

would pass quickly that will bring my garden to perfection! The Persian

Yellows have gone into their new quarters, and their place is occupied

by the tea-rose Safrano; all the rose beds are carpeted with pansies

sown in July and transplanted in October, each bed having a separate

colour. The purple ones are the most charming and go well with every

rose, but I have white ones with Laurette Messimy, and yellow ones with

Safrano, and a new red sort in the big centre bed of red roses. Round

the semicircle on the south side of the little privet hedge two rows of

annual larkspurs in all their delicate shades have been sown, and just

beyond the larkspurs, on the grass, is a semicircle of standard tea and

pillar roses.

In front of the house the long borders have been stocked with

larkspurs, annual and perennial, columbines, giant poppies, pinks,

Madonna lilies, wallflowers, hollyhocks, perennial phloxes, peonies,

lavender, starworts, cornflowers, Lychnis chalcedonica, and bulbs

packed in wherever bulbs could go. These are the borders that were so

hardly used by the other gardener. The spring boxes for the verandah

steps have been filled with pink and white and yellow tulips. I love

tulips better than any other spring flower; they are the embodiment of

alert cheerfulness and tidy grace, and next to a hyacinth look like a

wholesome, freshly tubbed young girl beside a stout lady whose every

movement weighs down the air with patchouli. Their faint, delicate

scent is refinement itself; and is there anything in the world more

charming than the sprightly way they hold up their little faces to the

sun? I have heard them called bold and flaunting, but to me they seem

modest grace itself, only always on the alert to enjoy life as much as

they can and not afraid of looking the sun or anything else above them

in the face. On the grass there are two beds of them carpeted with

forget-me-nots; and in the grass, in scattered groups, are daffodils

and narcissus. Down the wilder shrubbery walks foxgloves and mulleins

will (I hope) shine majestic; and one cool corner, backed by a group of

firs, is graced by Madonna lilies, white foxgloves, and columbines.

In a distant glade I have made a spring garden round an oak tree that

stands alone in the sun—groups of crocuses, daffodils, narcissus,

hyacinths, and tulips, among such flowering shrubs and trees as Pirus

Malus spectabilis, floribunda, and coronaria; Prunus Juliana, Mahaleb,

serotina, triloba, and Pissardi; Cydonias and Weigelias in every

colour, and several kinds of Cratægus and other May lovelinesses. If

the weather behaves itself nicely, and we get gentle rains in due

season, I think this little corner will be beautiful—but what a big

“if” it is! Drought is our great enemy, and the two last summers each

contained five weeks of blazing, cloudless heat when all the ditches

dried up and the soil was like hot pastry. At such times the watering

is naturally quite beyond the strength of two men; but as a garden is a

place to be happy in, and not one where you want to meet a dozen

curious eyes at every turn, I should not like to have more than these

two, or rather one and a half—the assistant having stork-like

proclivities and going home in the autumn to his native Russia,

returning in the spring with the first warm winds. I want to keep him

over the winter, as there is much to be done even then, and I sounded

him on the point the other day. He is the most abject-looking of human

beings—lame, and afflicted with a hideous eye-disease; but he is a good

worker and plods along unwearyingly from sunrise to dusk.

“Pray, my good stork,” said I, or German words to that effect, “why

don’t you stay here altogether, instead of going home and rioting away

all you have earned?”

“I would stay,” he answered, “but I have my wife there in Russia.”

“Your wife!” I exclaimed, stupidly surprised that the poor deformed

creature should have found a mate—as though there were not a

superfluity of mates in the world—“I didn’t know you were married?”

“Yes, and I have two little children, and I don’t know what they would

do if I were not to come home. But it is a very expensive journey to

Russia, and costs me every time seven marks.”

“Seven marks!”

“Yes, it is a great sum.”

I wondered whether I should be able to get to Russia for seven marks,

supposing I were to be seized with an unnatural craving to go there.

All the labourers who work here from March to December are Russians and

Poles, or a mixture of both. We send a man over who can speak their

language, to fetch as many as he can early in the year, and they arrive

with their bundles, men and women and babies, and as soon as they have

got here and had their fares paid, they disappear in the night if they

get the chance, sometimes fifty of them at a time, to go and work

singly or in couples for the peasants, who pay them a _pfenning_ or two

more a day than we do, and let them eat with the family. From us they

get a mark and a half to two marks a day, and as many potatoes as they

can eat. The women get less, not because they work less, but because

they are women and must not be encouraged. The overseer lives with

them, and has a loaded revolver in his pocket and a savage dog at his

heels. For the first week or two after their arrival, the foresters and

other permanent officials keep guard at night over the houses they are

put into. I suppose they find it sleepy work; for certain it is that

spring after spring the same thing happens, fifty of them getting away

in spite of all our precautions, and we are left with our mouths open

and much out of pocket. This spring, by some mistake, they arrived

without their bundles, which had gone astray on the road, and, as they

travel in their best clothes, they refused utterly to work until their

luggage came. Nearly a week was lost waiting, to the despair of all in

authority.

Nor will any persuasions induce them to do anything on Saints’ days,

and there surely never was a church so full of them as the Russian

Church. In the spring, when every hour is of vital importance, the work

is constantly being interrupted by them, and the workers lie sleeping

in the sun the whole day, agreeably conscious that they are pleasing

themselves and the Church at one and the same time—a state of

perfection as rare as it is desirable. Reason unaided by Faith is of

course exasperated at this waste of precious time, and I confess that

during the first mild days after the long winter frost when it is

possible to begin to work the ground, I have sympathised with the gloom

of the Man of Wrath, confronted in one week by two or three empty days

on which no man will labour, and have listened in silence to his

remarks about distant Russian saints.

I suppose it was my own superfluous amount of civilisation that made me

pity these people when first I came to live among them. They herd

together like animals and do the work of animals; but in spite of the

armed overseer, the dirt and the rags, the meals of potatoes washed

down by weak vinegar and water, I am beginning to believe that they

would strongly object to soap, I am sure they would not wear new

clothes, and I hear them coming home from their work at dusk singing.

They are like little children or animals in their utter inability to

grasp the idea of a future; and after all, if you work all day in God’s

sunshine, when evening comes you are pleasantly tired and ready for

rest and not much inclined to find fault with your lot. I have not yet

persuaded myself, however, that the women are happy. They have to work

as hard as the men and get less for it; they have to produce offspring,

quite regardless of times and seasons and the general fitness of

things; they have to do this as expeditiously as possible, so that they

may not unduly interrupt the work in hand; nobody helps them, notices

them, or cares about them, least of all the husband. It is quite a

usual thing to see them working in the fields in the morning, and

working again in the afternoon, having in the interval produced a baby.

The baby is left to an old woman whose duty it is to look after babies

collectively. When I expressed my horror at the poor creatures working

immediately afterwards as though nothing had happened, the Man of Wrath

informed me that they did not suffer because they had never worn

corsets, nor had their mothers and grandmothers. We were riding

together at the time, and had just passed a batch of workers, and my

husband was speaking to the overseer, when a woman arrived alone, and

taking up a spade, began to dig. She grinned cheerfully at us as she

made a curtesy, and the overseer remarked that she had just been back

to the house and had a baby.

“Poor, _poor_ woman!” I cried, as we rode on, feeling for some occult

reason very angry with the Man of Wrath. “And her wretched husband

doesn’t care a rap, and will probably beat her to-night if his supper

isn’t right. What nonsense it is to talk about the equality of the

sexes when the women have the babies!”

“Quite so, my dear,” replied the Man of Wrath, smiling condescendingly.

“You have got to the very root of the matter. Nature, while imposing

this agreeable duty on the woman, weakens her and disables her for any

serious competition with man. How can a person who is constantly losing

a year of the best part of her life compete with a young man who never

loses any time at all? He has the brute force, and his last word on any

subject could always be his fist.”

I said nothing. It was a dull, gray afternoon in the beginning of

November, and the leaves dropped slowly and silently at our horses’

feet as we rode towards the Hirschwald.

“It is a universal custom,” proceeded the Man of Wrath, “amongst these

Russians, and I believe amongst the lower classes everywhere, and

certainly commendable on the score of simplicity, to silence a woman’s

objections and aspirations by knocking her down. I have heard it said

that this apparently brutal action has anything but the maddening

effect tenderly nurtured persons might suppose, and that the patient is

soothed and satisfied with a rapidity and completeness unattainable by

other and more polite methods. Do you suppose,” he went on, flicking a

twig off a tree with his whip as we passed, “that the intellectual

husband, wrestling intellectually with the chaotic yearnings of his

intellectual wife, ever achieves the result aimed at? He may and does

go on wrestling till he is tired, but never does he in the very least

convince her of her folly; while his brother in the ragged coat has got

through the whole business in less time than it takes me to speak about

it. There is no doubt that these poor women fulfil their vocation far

more thoroughly than the women in our class, and, as the truest:

happiness consists in finding one’s vocation quickly and continuing in

it all one’s days, I consider they are to be envied rather than not,

since they are early taught, by the impossibility of argument with

marital muscle, the impotence of female endeavour and the blessings of

content.”

“Pray go on,” I said politely.

“These women accept their beatings with a simplicity worthy of all

praise, and far from considering themselves insulted, admire the

strength and energy of the man who can administer such eloquent

rebukes. In Russia, not only _may_ a man beat his wife, but it is laid

down in the catechism and taught all boys at the time of confirmation

as necessary at least once a week, whether she has done anything or

not, for the sake of her general health and happiness.”

I thought I observed a tendency in the Man of Wrath rather to gloat

over these castigations.

“Pray, my dear man,” I said, pointing with my whip, “look at that baby

moon so innocently peeping at us over the edge of the mist just behind

that silver birch; and don’t talk so much about women and things you

don’t understand. What is the use of your bothering about fists and

whips and muscles and all the dreadful things invented for the

confusion of obstreperous wives? You know you are a civilised husband,

and a civilised husband is a creature who has ceased to be a man.”

“And a civilised wife?” he asked, bringing his horse close up beside me

and putting his arm round my waist, “has she ceased to be a woman?”

“I should think so indeed,—she is a goddess, and can never be

worshipped and adored enough.”

“It seems to me,” he said, “that the conversation is growing personal.”

I started off at a canter across the short, springy turf. The

Hirschwald is an enchanted place on such an evening, when the mists lie

low on the turf, and overhead the delicate, bare branches of the silver

birches stand out clear against the soft sky, while the little moon

looks down kindly on the damp November world. Where the trees thicken

into a wood, the fragrance of the wet earth and rotting leaves kicked

up by the horses’ hoofs fills my soul with delight. I particularly love

that smell,—it brings before me the entire benevolence of Nature, for

ever working death and decay, so piteous in themselves, into the means

of fresh life and glory, and sending up sweet odours as she works.

_December_ 7_th_.—I have been to England. I went for at least a month

and stayed a week in a fog and was blown home again in a gale. Twice I

fled before the fogs into the country to see friends with gardens, but

it was raining, and except the beautiful lawns (not to be had in the

Fatherland) and the infinite possibilities, there was nothing to

interest the intelligent and garden-loving foreigner, for the good

reason that you cannot be interested in gardens under an umbrella. So I

went back to the fogs, and after groping about for a few days more

began to long inordinately for Germany. A terrific gale sprang up after

I had started, and the journey both by sea and land was full of

horrors, the trains in Germany being heated to such an extent that it

is next to impossible to sit still, great gusts of hot air coming up

under the cushions, the cushions themselves being very hot, and the

wretched traveller still hotter.

But when I reached my home and got out of the train into the purest,

brightest snow-atmosphere, the air so still that the whole world seemed

to be listening, the sky cloudless, the crisp snow sparkling underfoot

and on the trees, and a happy row of three beaming babies awaiting me,

I was consoled for all my torments, only remembering them enough to

wonder why I had gone away at all.

The babies each had a kitten in one hand and an elegant bouquet of pine

needles and grass in the other, and what with the due presentation of

the bouquets and the struggles of the kittens, the hugging and kissing

was much interfered with. Kittens, bouquets, and babies were all

somehow squeezed into the sleigh, and off we went with jingling bells

and shrieks of delight. “Directly you comes home the fun begins,” said

the May baby, sitting very close to me. “How the snow purrs!” cried the

April baby, as the horses scrunched it up with their feet. The June

baby sat loudly singing “The King of Love my Shepherd is,” and swinging

her kitten round by its tail to emphasise the rhythm.

The house, half-buried in the snow, looked the very abode of peace, and

I ran through all the rooms, eager to take possession of them again,

and feeling as though I had been away for ever. When I got to the

library I came to a standstill,—ah, the dear room, what happy times I

have spent in it rummaging amongst the books, making plans for my

garden, building castles in the air, writing, dreaming, doing nothing!

There was a big peat fire blazing half up the chimney, and the old

housekeeper had put pots of flowers about, and on the writing-table was

a great bunch of violets scenting the room. “Oh, how _good_ it is to be

home again!” I sighed in my satisfaction. The babies clung about my

knees, looking up at me with eyes full of love. Outside the dazzling

snow and sunshine, inside the bright room and happy faces—I thought of

those yellow fogs and shivered. The library is not used by the Man of

Wrath; it is neutral ground where we meet in the evenings for an hour

before he disappears into his own rooms—a series of very smoky dens in

the southeast corner of the house. It looks, I am afraid, rather too

gay for an ideal library; and its colouring, white and yellow, is so

cheerful as to be almost frivolous. There are white bookcases all round

the walls, and there is a great fireplace, and four windows, facing

full south, opening on to my most cherished bit of garden, the bit

round the sun-dial; so that with so much colour and such a big fire and

such floods of sunshine it has anything but a sober air, in spite of

the venerable volumes filling the shelves. Indeed, I should never be

surprised if they skipped down from their places, and, picking up their

leaves, began to dance.

With this room to live in, I can look forward with perfect equanimity

to being snowed up for any time Providence thinks proper; and to go

into the garden in its snowed-up state is like going into a bath of

purity. The first breath on opening the door is so ineffably pure that

it makes me gasp, and I feel a black and sinful object in the midst of

all the spotlessness. Yesterday I sat out of doors near the sun-dial

the whole afternoon, with the thermometer so many degrees below

freezing that it will be weeks finding its way up again; but there was

no wind, and beautiful sunshine, and I was well wrapped up in furs. I

even had tea brought out there, to the astonishment of the menials, and

sat till long after the sun had set, enjoying the frosty air. I had to

drink the tea very quickly, for it showed a strong inclination to begin

to freeze. After the sun had gone down the rooks came home to their

nests in the garden with a great fuss and fluttering, and many

hesitations and squabbles before they settled on their respective

trees. They flew over my head in hundreds with a mighty swish of wings,

and when they had arranged themselves comfortably, an intense hush fell

upon the garden, and the house began to look like a Christmas card,

with its white roof against the clear, pale green of the western sky,

and lamplight shining in the windows.

I had been reading a Life of Luther, lent me by our parson, in the

intervals between looking round me and being happy. He came one day

with the book and begged me to read it, having discovered that my

interest in Luther was not as living as it ought to be; so I took it

out with me into the garden, because the dullest book takes on a

certain saving grace if read out of doors, just as bread and butter,

devoid of charm in the drawing-room, is ambrosia eaten under a tree. I

read Luther all the afternoon with pauses for refreshing glances at the

garden and the sky, and much thankfulness in my heart. His struggles

with devils amazed me; and I wondered whether such a day as that, full

of grace and the forgiveness of sins, never struck him as something to

make him relent even towards devils. He apparently never allowed

himself just to be happy. He was a wonderful man, but I am glad I was

not his wife.

Our parson is an interesting person, and untiring in his efforts to

improve himself. Both he and his wife study whenever they have a spare

moment, and there is a tradition that she stirs her puddings with one

hand and holds a Latin grammar in the other, the grammar, of course,

getting the greater share of her attention. To most German _Hausfraus_

the dinners and the puddings are of paramount importance, and they

pride themselves on keeping those parts of their houses that are seen

in a state of perpetual and spotless perfection, and this is

exceedingly praiseworthy; but, I would humbly inquire, are there not

other things even more important? And is not plain living and high

thinking better than the other way about? And all too careful making of

dinners and dusting of furniture takes a terrible amount of precious

time, and—and with shame I confess that my sympathies are all with the

pudding and the grammar. It cannot be right to be the slave of one’s

household gods, and I protest that if my furniture ever annoyed me by

wanting to be dusted when I wanted to be doing something else, and

there was no one to do the dusting for me, I would cast it all into the

nearest bonfire and sit and warm my toes at the flames with great

contentment, triumphantly selling my dusters to the very next pedlar

who was weak enough to buy them. Parsons’ wives have to do the

housework and cooking themselves, and are thus not only cooks and

housemaids, but if they have children—and they always do have

children—they are head and under nurse as well; and besides these

trifling duties have a good deal to do with their fruit and vegetable

garden, and everything to do with their poultry. This being so, is it

not pathetic to find a young woman bravely struggling to learn

languages and keep up with her husband? If I were that husband, those

puddings would taste sweetest to me that were served with Latin sauce.

They are both severely pious, and are for ever engaged in desperate

efforts to practise what they preach; than which, as we all know,

nothing is more difficult. He works in his parish with the most noble

self-devotion, and never loses courage, although his efforts have been

several times rewarded by disgusting libels pasted up on the

street-corners, thrown under doors, and even fastened to his own garden

wall. The peasant hereabouts is past belief low and animal, and a

sensitive, intellectual parson among them is really a pearl before

swine. For years he has gone on unflinchingly, filled with the most

living faith and hope and charity, and I sometimes wonder whether they

are any better now in his parish than they were under his predecessor,

a man who smoked and drank beer from Monday morning to Saturday night,

never did a stroke of work, and often kept the scanty congregation

waiting on Sunday afternoons while he finished his postprandial nap. It

is discouraging enough to make most men give in, and leave the parish

to get to heaven or not as it pleases; but he never seems discouraged,

and goes on sacrificing the best part of his life to these people when

all his tastes are literary, and all his inclinations towards the life

of the student. His convictions drag him out of his little home at all

hours to minister to the sick and exhort the wicked; they give him no

rest, and never let him feel he has done enough; and when he comes home

weary, after a day’s wrestling with his parishioners’ souls, he is

confronted on his doorstep by filthy abuse pasted up on his own front

door. He never speaks of these things, but how shall they be hid?

Everybody here knows everything that happens before the day is over,

and what we have for dinner is of far greater general interest than the

most astounding political earthquake. They have a pretty, roomy

cottage, and a good bit of ground adjoining the churchyard. His

predecessor used to hang out his washing on the tombstones to dry, but

then he was a person entirely lost to all sense of decency, and had

finally to be removed, preaching a farewell sermon of a most

vituperative description, and hurling invective at the Man of Wrath,

who sat up in his box drinking in every word and enjoying himself

thoroughly. The Man of Wrath likes novelty, and such a sermon had never

been heard before. It is spoken of in the village to this day with

bated breath and awful joy.

_December_ 22_nd_.—Up to now we have had a beautiful winter. Clear

skies, frost, little wind, and, except for a sharp touch now and then,

very few really cold days. My windows are gay with hyacinths and lilies

of the valley; and though, as I have said, I don’t admire the smell of

hyacinths in the spring when it seems wanting in youth and chastity

next to that of other flowers, I am glad enough now to bury my nose in

their heavy sweetness. In December one cannot afford to be fastidious;

besides, one is actually less fastidious about everything in the

winter. The keen air braces soul as well as body into robustness, and

the food and the perfume disliked in the summer are perfectly welcome

then.

I am very busy preparing for Christmas, but have often locked myself up

in a room alone, shutting out my unfinished duties, to study the flower

catalogues and make my lists of seeds and shrubs and trees for the

spring. It is a fascinating occupation, and acquires an additional

charm when you know you ought to be doing something else, that

Christmas is at the door, that children and servants and farm hands

depend on you for their pleasure, and that, if you don’t see to the

decoration of the trees and house, and the buying of the presents,

nobody else will. The hours fly by shut up with those catalogues and

with Duty snarling on the other side of the door. I don’t like

Duty—everything in the least disagreeable is always sure to be one’s

duty. Why cannot it be my duty to make lists and plans for the dear

garden? “And so it _is_,” I insisted to the Man of Wrath, when he

protested against what he called wasting my time upstairs. “No,” he

replied sagely; “your garden is not your duty, because it is your

Pleasure.”

What a comfort it is to have such wells of wisdom constantly at my

disposal! Anybody can have a husband, but to few is it given to have a

sage, and the combination of both is as rare as it is useful. Indeed,

in its practical utility the only thing I ever saw to equal it is a

sofa my neighbour has bought as a Christmas surprise for her husband,

and which she showed me the last time I called there—a beautiful

invention, as she explained, combining a bedstead, a sofa, and a chest

of drawers, and into which you put your clothes, and on top of which

you put yourself, and if anybody calls in the middle of the night and

you happen to be using the drawing-room as a bedroom, you just pop the

bedclothes inside, and there you are discovered sitting on your sofa

and looking for all the world as though you had been expecting visitors

for hours.

“Pray, does he wear pyjamas?” I inquired.

But she had never heard of pyjamas.

It takes a long time to make my spring lists. I want to have a border

all yellow, every shade of yellow from fieriest orange to nearly white,

and the amount of work and studying of gardening books it costs me will

only be appreciated by beginners like myself. I have been weeks

planning it, and it is not nearly finished. I want it to be a

succession of glories from May till the frosts, and the chief feature

is to be the number of “ardent marigolds”—flowers that I very tenderly

love—and nasturtiums. The nasturtiums are to be of every sort and

shade, and are to climb and creep and grow in bushes, and show their

lovely flowers and leaves to the best advantage. Then there are to be

eschscholtzias, dahlias, sunflowers, zinnias, scabiosa, portulaca,

yellow violas, yellow stocks, yellow sweet-peas, yellow

lupins—everything that is yellow or that has a yellow variety. The

place I have chosen for it is a long, wide border in the sun, at the

foot of a grassy slope crowned with lilacs and pines, and facing

southeast. You go through a little pine wood, and, turning a corner,

are to come suddenly upon this bit of captured morning glory. I want it

to be blinding in its brightness after the dark, cool path through the

wood.

That is the idea. Depression seizes me when I reflect upon the probable

difference between the idea and its realisation. I am ignorant, and the

gardener is, I do believe, still more so; for he was forcing some

tulips, and they have all shrivelled up and died, and he says he cannot

imagine why. Besides, he is in love with the cook, and is going to

marry her after Christmas, and refuses to enter into any of my plans

with the enthusiasm they deserve, but sits with vacant eye dreamily

chopping wood from morning till night to keep the beloved one’s kitchen

fire well supplied. I cannot understand any one preferring cooks to

marigolds; those future marigolds, shadowy as they are, and whose seeds

are still sleeping at the seedsman’s, have shone through my winter days

like golden lamps.

I wish with all my heart I were a man, for of course the first thing I

should do would be to buy a spade and go and garden, and then I should

have the delight of doing everything for my flowers with my own hands

and need not waste time explaining what I want done to somebody else.

It is dull work giving orders and trying to describe the bright visions

of one’s brain to a person who has no visions and no brain, and who

thinks a yellow bed should be calceolarias edged with blue.

I have taken care in choosing my yellow plants to put down only those

humble ones that are easily pleased and grateful for little, for my

soil is by no means all that it might be, and to most plants the

climate is rather trying. I feel really grateful to any flower that is

sturdy and willing enough to flourish here. Pansies seem to like the

place and so do sweet-peas; pinks don’t, and after much coaxing gave

hardly any flowers last summer. Nearly all the roses were a success, in

spite of the sandy soil, except the tea-rose Adam, which was covered

with buds ready to open, when they suddenly turned brown and died, and

three standard Dr. Grills which stood in a row and simply sulked. I had

been very excited about Dr. Grill, his description in the catalogues

being specially fascinating, and no doubt I deserved the snubbing I

got. “Never be excited, my dears, about _anything_,” shall be the

advice I will give the three babies when the time comes to take them

out to parties, “or, if you are, don’t show it. If by nature you are

volcanoes, at least be only smouldering ones. Don’t look pleased, don’t

look interested, don’t, above all things, look eager. Calm indifference

should be written on every feature of your faces. Never show that you

like any one person, or any one thing. Be cool, languid, and reserved.

If you don’t do as your mother tells you and are just gushing, frisky,

young idiots, snubs will be your portion. If you do as she tells you,

you’ll marry princes and live happily ever after.”

Dr. Grill must be a German rose. In this part of the world the more you

are pleased to see a person the less is he pleased to see you; whereas,

if you are disagreeable, he will grow pleasant visibly, his countenance

expanding into wider amiability the more your own is stiff and sour.

But I was not prepared for that sort of thing in a rose, and was

disgusted with Dr. Grill. He had the best place in the garden—warm,

sunny, and sheltered; his holes were prepared with the tenderest care;

he was given the most dainty mixture of compost, clay, and manure; he

was watered assiduously all through the drought when more willing

flowers got nothing; and he refused to do anything but look black and

shrivel. He did not die, but neither did he live—he just existed; and

at the end of the summer not one of him had a scrap more shoot or leaf

than when he was first put in in April. It would have been better if he

had died straight away, for then I should have known what to do; as it

is, there he is still occupying the best place, wrapped up carefully

for the winter, excluding kinder roses, and probably intending to

repeat the same conduct next year. Well, trials are the portion of

mankind, and gardeners have their share, and in any case it is better

to be tried by plants than persons, seeing that with plants you know

that it is you who are in the wrong, and with persons it is always the

other way about—and who is there among us who has not felt the pangs of

injured innocence, and known them to be grievous?

I have two visitors staying with me, though I have done nothing to

provoke such an infliction, and had been looking forward to a happy

little Christmas alone with the Man of Wrath and the babies. Fate

decreed otherwise. Quite regularly, if I look forward to anything, Fate

steps in and decrees otherwise; I don’t know why it should, but it

does. I had not even invited these good ladies—like greatness on the

modest, they were thrust upon me. One is Irais, the sweet singer of the

summer, whom I love as she deserves, but of whom I certainly thought I

had seen the last for at least a year, when she wrote and asked if I

would have her over Christmas, as her husband was out of sorts, and she

didn’t like him in that state. Neither do I like sick husbands, so,

full of sympathy, I begged her to come, and here she is. And the other

is Minora.

Why I have to have Minora I don’t know, for I was not even aware of her

existence a fortnight ago. Then coming down cheerfully one morning to

breakfast—it was the very day after my return from England—I found a

letter from an English friend, who up till then had been perfectly

innocuous, asking me to befriend Minora. I read the letter aloud for

the benefit of the Man of Wrath, who was eating _Spickgans_, a delicacy

much sought after in these parts. “Do, my dear Elizabeth,” wrote my

friend, “take some notice of the poor thing. She is studying art in

Dresden, and has nowhere literally to go for Christmas. She is very

ambitious and hardworking—”

“Then,” interrupted the Man of Wrath, “she is not pretty. Only ugly

girls work hard.”

“—and she is really very clever—”

“I do not like clever girls, they are so stupid,” again interrupted the

Man of Wrath.

“—and unless some kind creature like yourself takes pity on her she

will be very lonely.”

“Then let her be lonely.”

“Her mother is my oldest friend, and would be greatly distressed to

think that her daughter should be alone in a foreign town at such a

season.”

“I do not mind the distress of the mother.”

“Oh, dear me,” I exclaimed impatiently, “I shall have to ask her to

come!”

“If you _should_ be inclined,” the letter went on, “to play the good

Samaritan, dear Elizabeth, I am positive you would find Minora a

bright, intelligent companion—”

“Minora?” questioned the Man of Wrath.

The April baby, who has had a nursery governess of an altogether

alarmingly zealous type attached to her person for the last six weeks,

looked up from her bread and milk.

“It sounds like islands,” she remarked pensively.

The governess coughed.

“Majora, Minora, Alderney, and Sark,” explained her pupil.