Elizabeth and Her German Garden

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ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN

By Elizabeth Von Arnim

INTRODUCTION TO THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EDITION

Originally published in 1898,family board games for boys “Elizabeth and her German Garden” is the firstbook by Marie Annette Beauchamp—known all her life as “Elizabeth”. The book,anonymously published, was an incredible success, going through printing afterprinting by several publishers over the next few years. (I myself own threeseparate early editions of this book by different publishers on both sides ofthe Atlantic.) The present Gutenberg edition was scanned from the illustrateddeluxe MacMillan (London) edition of 1900.

Elizabeth was a cousin of the better-known writer Katherine Mansfield (whosereal name was Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp). Born in Australia, Elizabeth waseducated in England. She was reputed to be a fine organist and musician. At ayoung age, she captured the heart of a German Count, was persuaded to marryhim, and went to live in Germany. Over the next years she bore five daughters.After her husband’s death and the decline of the estate, she returned toEngland. She was a friend to many of high social standing, including peoplesuch as H. G. Wells (who considered her one of the finest wits of the day).Some time later she married the brother of Bertrand Russell; which marriage wasa failure and ended in divorce. Eventually Elizabeth fled to America at theoutbreak of the Second World War, and there died in 1941.

Elizabeth is best known to modern readers by the name “Elizabeth von Arnim”,author of “The Enchanted April” which was recently made into a successful filmby the same title. Another of her books, “Mr. Skeffington” was also once madeinto a film starring Bette Davis, circa 1940.

Some of Elizabeth’s work is published in modern editions by Virago and otherpublishers. Among these are: “Love”, “The Enchanted April”, “Caravaners”,“Christopher and Columbus”, “The Pastor’s Wife”, “Mr. Skeffington”, “TheSolitary Summer”, and “Elizabeth’s Adventures in Rugen”. Also published byVirago is her non-autobiography “All the Dogs of My Life”—as the titlesuggests, it is the story not of her life, but of the lives of the many dogsshe owned; though of course it does touch upon her own experiences.

In the centennial year of this book’s first publication, I hope that itsavailability through Project Gutenberg will stir some renewed interest inElizabeth and her delightful work. She is, I would venture, my favorite author;and I hope that soon she will be one of your favorites.

R. McGowan San Jose, April 11 1998.

ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN

May7th.—I love my garden. I am writing in it now in the lateafternoon loveliness, much interrupted by the mosquitoes and the temptation tolook at all the glories of the new green leaves washed half an hour ago in acold shower. Two owls are perched near me, and are carrying on a longconversation that I enjoy as much as any warbling of nightingales. Thegentleman owl says , and she answers from her tree alittle way off, , beautifully assenting to and completing herlord’s remark, as becomes a properly constructed German she-owl. They say thesame thing over and over again so emphatically that I think it must besomething nasty about me; but I shall not let myself be frightened away by thesarcasm of owls.

This is less a garden than a wilderness. No one has lived in the house, muchless in the garden, for twenty-five years, and it is such a pretty old placethat the people who might have lived here and did not, deliberately preferringthe horrors of a flat in a town, must have belonged to that vast number ofeyeless and earless persons of whom the world seems chiefly composed. Noselesstoo, though it does not sound pretty; but the greater part of my springhappiness is due to the scent of the wet earth and young leaves.

I am always happy (out of doors be it understood, for indoors there areservants and furniture) but in quite different ways, and my spring happinessbears no resemblance to my summer or autumn happiness, though it is not moreintense, and there were days last winter when I danced for sheer joy out in myfrost-bound garden, in spite of my years and children. But I did it behind abush, having a due regard for the decencies.

There are so many bird-cherries round me, great trees with branches sweepingthe grass, and they are so wreathed just now with white blossoms and tenderestgreen that the garden looks like a wedding. I never saw such masses of them;they seemed to fill the place. Even across a little stream that bounds thegarden on the east, and right in the middle of the cornfield beyond, there isan immense one, a picture of grace and glory against the cold blue of thespring sky.

My garden is surrounded by cornfields and meadows, and beyond are greatstretches of sandy heath and pine forests, and where the forests leave off thebare heath begins again; but the forests are beautiful in their lofty,pink-stemmed vastness, far overhead the crowns of softest gray-green, andunderfoot a bright green wortleberry carpet, and everywhere the breathlesssilence; and the bare heaths are beautiful too, for one can see across theminto eternity almost, and to go out on to them with one’s face towards thesetting sun is like going into the very presence of God.

In the middle of this plain is the oasis of bird-cherries and greenery where Ispend my happy days, and in the middle of the oasis is the gray stone housewith many gables where I pass my reluctant nights. The house is very old, andhas been added to at various times. It was a convent before the Thirty Years’War, and the vaulted chapel, with its brick floor worn by pious peasant knees,is now used as a hall. Gustavus Adolphus and his Swedes passed through morethan once, as is duly recorded in archives still preserved, for we are on whatwas then the high-road between Sweden and Brandenburg the unfortunate. The Lionof the North was no doubt an estimable person and acted wholly up to hisconvictions, but he must have sadly upset the peaceful nuns, who were notwithout convictions of their own, sending them out on to the wide, empty plainto piteously seek some life to replace the life of silence here.

From nearly all the windows of the house I can look out across the plain, withno obstacle in the shape of a hill, right away to a blue line of distantforest, and on the west side uninterruptedly to the setting sun—nothing but agreen, rolling plain, with a sharp edge against the sunset. I love those westwindows better than any others, and have chosen my bedroom on that side of thehouse so that even times of hair-brushing may not be entirely lost, and theyoung woman who attends to such matters has been taught to fulfil her dutiesabout a mistress recumbent in an easy-chair before an open window, and not toprofane with chatter that sweet and solemn time. This girl is grieved at myhabit of living almost in the garden, and all her ideas as to the sort of lifea respectable German lady should lead have got into a sad muddle since she cameto me. The people round about are persuaded that I am, to put it as kindly aspossible, exceedingly eccentric, for the news has travelled that I spend theday out of doors with a book, and that no mortal eye has ever yet seen me sewor cook. But why cook when you can get some one to cook for you? And as forsewing, the maids will hem the sheets better and quicker than I could, and allforms of needlework of the fancy order are inventions of the evil one forkeeping the foolish from applying their heart to wisdom.

We had been married five years before it struck us that we might as well makeuse of this place by coming down and living in it. Those five years were spentin a flat in a town, and during their whole interminable length I was perfectlymiserable and perfectly healthy, which disposes of the ugly notion that has attimes disturbed me that my happiness here is less due to the garden than to agood digestion. And while we were wasting our lives there, here was this dearplace with dandelions up to the very door, all the paths grass-grown andcompletely effaced, in winter so lonely, with nobody but the north wind takingthe least notice of it, and in May—in all those five lovely Mays—no one to lookat the wonderful bird-cherries and still more wonderful masses of lilacs,everything glowing and blowing, the virginia creeper madder every year, untilat last, in October, the very roof was wreathed with blood-red tresses, theowls and the squirrels and all the blessed little birds reigning supreme, andnot a living creature ever entering the empty house except the snakes, whichgot into the habit during those silent years of wriggling up the south wallinto the rooms on that side whenever the old housekeeper opened the windows.All that was here,—peace, and happiness, and a reasonable life,—and yet itnever struck me to come and live in it. Looking back I am astonished, and canin no way account for the tardiness of my discovery that here, in this far-awaycorner, was my kingdom of heaven. Indeed, so little did it enter my head toeven use the place in summer, that I submitted to weeks of seaside life withall its horrors every year; until at last, in the early spring of last year,having come down for the opening of the village school, and wandering outafterwards into the bare and desolate garden, I don’t know what smell of wetearth or rotting leaves brought back my childhood with a rush and all the happydays I had spent in a garden. Shall I ever forget that day? It was thebeginning of my real life, my coming of age as it were, and entering into mykingdom. Early March, gray, quiet skies, and brown, quiet earth; leafless andsad and lonely enough out there in the damp and silence, yet there I stoodfeeling the same rapture of pure delight in the first breath of spring that Iused to as a child, and the five wasted years fell from me like a cloak, andthe world was full of hope, and I vowed myself then and there to nature, andhave been happy ever since.

My other half being indulgent, and with some faint thought perhaps that itmight be as well to look after the place, consented to live in it at any ratefor a time; whereupon followed six specially blissful weeks from the end ofApril into June, during which I was here alone, supposed to be superintendingthe painting and papering, but as a matter of fact only going into the housewhen the workmen had gone out of it.

How happy I was! I don’t remember any time quite so perfect since the days whenI was too little to do lessons and was turned out with sugar on my eleveno’clock bread and butter on to a lawn closely strewn with dandelions anddaisies. The sugar on the bread and butter has lost its charm, but I love thedandelions and daisies even more passionately now than then, and never wouldendure to see them all mown away if I were not certain that in a day or twothey would be pushing up their little faces again as jauntily as ever. Duringthose six weeks I lived in a world of dandelions and delights. The dandelionscarpeted the three lawns,—they used to be lawns, but have long since blossomedout into meadows filled with every sort of pretty weed,—and under and among thegroups of leafless oaks and beeches were blue hepaticas, white anemones,violets, and celandines in sheets. The celandines in particular delighted mewith their clean, happy brightness, so beautifully trim and newly varnished, asthough they too had had the painters at work on them. Then, when the anemoneswent, came a few stray periwinkles and Solomon’s Seal, and all thebird-cherries blossomed in a burst. And then, before I had a little got used tothe joy of their flowers against the sky, came the lilacs—masses and masses ofthem, in clumps on the grass, with other shrubs and trees by the side of walks,and one great continuous bank of them half a mile long right past the westfront of the house, away down as far as one could see, shining glorious againsta background of firs. When that time came, and when, before it was over, theacacias all blossomed too, and four great clumps of pale, silvery-pink peoniesflowered under the south windows, I felt so absolutely happy, and blest, andthankful, and grateful, that I really cannot describe it. My days seemed tomelt away in a dream of pink and purple peace.

There were only the old housekeeper and her handmaiden in the house, so that onthe plea of not giving too much trouble I could indulge what my other halfcalls my fantaisie dérégléeas regards meals—that is to say, meals sosimple that they could be brought out to the lilacs on a tray; and I lived, Iremember, on salad and bread and tea the whole time, sometimes a very tinypigeon appearing at lunch to save me, as the old lady thought, from starvation.Who but a woman could have stood salad for six weeks, even salad sanctified bythe presence and scent of the most gorgeous lilac masses? I did, and grew ingrace every day, though I have never liked it since. How often now, oppressedby the necessity of assisting at three dining-room meals daily, two of whichare conducted by the functionaries held indispensable to a proper maintenanceof the family dignity, and all of which are pervaded by joints of meat, howoften do I think of my salad days, forty in number, and of the blessedness ofbeing alone as I was then alone!

And then the evenings, when the workmen had all gone and the house was left toemptiness and echoes, and the old housekeeper had gathered up her rheumaticlimbs into her bed, and my little room in quite another part of the house hadbeen set ready, how reluctantly I used to leave the friendly frogs and owls,and with my heart somewhere down in my shoes lock the door to the garden behindme, and pass through the long series of echoing south rooms full of shadows andladders and ghostly pails of painters’ mess, and humming a tune to make myselfbelieve I liked it, go rather slowly across the brick-floored hall, up thecreaking stairs, down the long whitewashed passage, and with a final rush ofpanic whisk into my room and double lock and bolt the door!

There were no bells in the house, and I used to take a great dinner-bell to bedwith me so that at least I might be able to make a noise if frightened in thenight, though what good it would have been I don’t know, as there was no one tohear. The housemaid slept in another little cell opening out of mine, and wetwo were the only living creatures in the great empty west wing. She evidentlydid not believe in ghosts, for I could hear how she fell asleep immediatelyafter getting into bed; nor do I believe in them, “mais je les redoute,”as a French lady said, who from her books appears to have been strongminded.

The dinner-bell was a great solace; it was never rung, but it comforted me tosee it on the chair beside my bed, as my nights were anything but placid, itwas all so strange, and there were such queer creakings and other noises. Iused to lie awake for hours, startled out of a light sleep by the cracking ofsome board, and listen to the indifferent snores of the girl in the next room.In the morning, of course, I was as brave as a lion and much amused at the coldperspirations of the night before; but even the nights seem to me now to havebeen delightful, and myself like those historic boys who heard a voice in everywind and snatched a fearful joy. I would gladly shiver through them all overagain for the sake of the beautiful purity of the house, empty of servants andupholstery.

How pretty the bedrooms looked with nothing in them but their cheerful newpapers! Sometimes I would go into those that were finished and build all sortsof castles in the air about their future and their past. Would the nuns who hadlived in them know their little white-washed cells again, all gay with delicateflower papers and clean white paint? And how astonished they would be to seecell No. 14 turned into a bathroom, with a bath big enough to insure acleanliness of body equal to their purity of soul! They would look upon it as asnare of the tempter; and I know that in my own case I only began to be shockedat the blackness of my nails the day that I began to lose the first whitenessof my soul by falling in love at fifteen with the parish organist, or ratherwith the glimpse of surplice and Roman nose and fiery moustache which was all Iever saw of him, and which I loved to distraction for at least six months; atthe end of which time, going out with my governess one day, I passed him in thestreet, and discovered that his unofficial garb was a frock-coat combined witha turn-down collar and a “bowler” hat, and never loved him any more.

The first part of that time of blessedness was the most perfect, for I had nota thought of anything but the peace and beauty all round me. Then he appearedsuddenly who has a right to appear when and how he will and rebuked me fornever having written, and when I told him that I had been literally too happyto think of writing, he seemed to take it as a reflection on himself that Icould be happy alone. I took him round the garden along the new paths I had hadmade, and showed him the acacia and lilac glories, and he said that it was thepurest selfishness to enjoy myself when neither he nor the offspring were withme, and that the lilacs wanted thoroughly pruning. I tried to appease him byoffering him the whole of my salad and toast supper which stood ready at thefoot of the little verandah steps when we came back, but nothing appeased thatMan of Wrath, and he said he would go straight back to the neglected family. Sohe went; and the remainder of the precious time was disturbed by twinges ofconscience (to which I am much subject) whenever I found myself wanting to jumpfor joy. I went to look at the painters every time my feet were for taking meto look at the garden; I trotted diligently up and down the passages; Icriticised and suggested and commanded more in one day than I had done in allthe rest of the time; I wrote regularly and sent my love; but I could notmanage to fret and yearn. What are you to do if your conscience is clear andyour liver in order and the sun is shining?

May10th.—I knew nothing whatever last year about gardening andthis year know very little more, but I have dawnings of what may be done, andhave at least made one great stride—from ipomæa to tea-roses.

The garden was an absolute wilderness. It is all round the house, but theprincipal part is on the south side and has evidently always been so. The southfront is one-storied, a long series of rooms opening one into the other, andthe walls are covered with virginia creeper. There is a little verandah in themiddle, leading by a flight of rickety wooden steps down into what seems tohave been the only spot in the whole place that was ever cared for. This is asemicircle cut into the lawn and edged with privet, and in this semicircle areeleven beds of different sizes bordered with box and arranged round a sun-dial,and the sun-dial is very venerable and moss-grown, and greatly beloved by me.These beds were the only sign of any attempt at gardening to be seen (except asolitary crocus that came up all by itself each spring in the grass, notbecause it wanted to, but because it could not help it), and these I had sownwith ipomæa, the whole eleven, having found a German gardening book, accordingto which ipomæa in vast quantities was the one thing needful to turn the mosthideous desert into a paradise. Nothing else in that book was recommended withanything like the same warmth, and being entirely ignorant of the quantity ofseed necessary, I bought ten pounds of it and had it sown not only in theeleven beds but round nearly every tree, and then waited in great agitation forthe promised paradise to appear. It did not, and I learned my first lesson.

Luckily I had sown two great patches of sweet-peas which made me very happy allthe summer, and then there were some sunflowers and a few hollyhocks under thesouth windows, with Madonna lilies in between. But the lilies, after beingtransplanted, disappeared to my great dismay, for how was I to know it was theway of lilies? And the hollyhocks turned out to be rather ugly colours, so thatmy first summer was decorated and beautified solely by sweet-peas. At presentwe are only just beginning to breathe after the bustle of getting new beds andborders and paths made in time for this summer. The eleven beds round thesun-dial are filled with roses, but I see already that I have made mistakeswith some. As I have not a living soul with whom to hold communion on this orindeed on any matter, my only way of learning is by making mistakes. All elevenwere to have been carpeted with purple pansies, but finding that I had notenough and that nobody had any to sell me, only six have got their pansies, theothers being sown with dwarf mignonette. Two of the eleven are filled withMarie van Houtte roses, two with Viscountess Folkestone, two with LauretteMessimy, one with Souvenir de la Malmaison, one with Adam and Devoniensis, twowith Persian Yellow and Bicolor, and one big bed behind the sun-dial with threesorts of red roses (seventy-two in all), Duke of Teck, Cheshunt Scarlet, andPrefet de Limburg. This bed is, I am sure, a mistake, and several of the othersare, I think, but of course I must wait and see, being such an ignorant person.Then I have had two long beds made in the grass on either side of thesemicircle, each sown with mignonette, and one filled with Marie van Houtte,and the other with Jules Finger and the Bride; and in a warm corner under thedrawing-room windows is a bed of Madame Lambard, Madame de Watteville, andComtesse Riza du Parc; while farther down the garden, sheltered on the northand west by a group of beeches and lilacs, is another large bed, containingRubens, Madame Joseph Schwartz, and the Hon. Edith Gifford. All these roses aredwarf; I have only two standards in the whole garden, two Madame GeorgeBruants, and they look like broomsticks. How I long for the day when thetea-roses open their buds! Never did I look forward so intensely to anything;and every day I go the rounds, admiring what the dear little things haveachieved in the twenty-four hours in the way of new leaf or increase of lovelyred shoot.

The hollyhocks and lilies (now flourishing) are still under the south windowsin a narrow border on the top of a grass slope, at the foot of which I havesown two long borders of sweet-peas facing the rose beds, so that my roses mayhave something almost as sweet as themselves to look at until the autumn, wheneverything is to make place for more tea-roses. The path leading away from thissemicircle down the garden is bordered with China roses, white and pink, withhere and there a Persian Yellow. I wish now I had put tea-roses there, and Ihave misgivings as to the effect of the Persian Yellows among the Chinas, forthe Chinas are such wee little baby things, and the Persian Yellows look asthough they intended to be big bushes.

There is not a creature in all this part of the world who could in the leastunderstand with what heart-beatings I am looking forward to the flowering ofthese roses, and not a German gardening book that does not relegate alltea-roses to hot-houses, imprisoning them for life, and depriving them for everof the breath of God. It was no doubt because I was so ignorant that I rushedin where Teutonic angels fear to tread and made my tea-roses face a northernwinter; but they did face it under fir branches and leaves, and not one hassuffered, and they are looking to-day as happy and as determined to enjoythemselves as any roses, I am sure, in Europe.

May14th.—To-day I am writing on the verandah with the threebabies, more persistent than mosquitoes, raging round me, and already severalof the thirty fingers have been in the ink-pot and the owners consoled whenduty pointed to rebukes. But who can rebuke such penitent and droopingsunbonnets? I can see nothing but sunbonnets and pinafores and nimble blacklegs.

These three, their patient nurse, myself, the gardener, and the gardener’sassistant, are the only people who ever go into my garden, but then neither arewe ever out of it. The gardener has been here a year and has given me noticeregularly on the first of every month, but up to now has been induced to stayon. On the first of this month he came as usual, and with determination writtenon every feature told me he intended to go in June, and that nothing shouldalter his decision. I don’t think he knows much about gardening, but he can atleast dig and water, and some of the things he sows come up, and some of theplants he plants grow, besides which he is the most unflaggingly industriousperson I ever saw, and has the great merit of never appearing to take thefaintest interest in what we do in the garden. So I have tried to keep him on,not knowing what the next one may be like, and when I asked him what he had tocomplain of and he replied “Nothing,” I could only conclude that he has apersonal objection to me because of my eccentric preference for plants ingroups rather than plants in lines. Perhaps, too, he does not like the extractsfrom gardening books I read to him sometimes when he is planting or sowingsomething new. Being so helpless myself, I thought it simpler, instead ofexplaining, to take the book itself out to him and let him have wisdom at itsvery source, administering it in doses while he worked. I quite recognise thatthis must be annoying, and only my anxiety not to lose a whole year throughsome stupid mistake has given me the courage to do it. I laugh sometimes behindthe book at his disgusted face, and wish we could be photographed, so that Imay be reminded in twenty years’ time, when the garden is a bower of lovelinessand I learned in all its ways, of my first happy struggles and failures.

All through April he was putting the perennials we had sown in the autumn intotheir permanent places, and all through April he went about with a long pieceof string making parallel lines down the borders of beautiful exactitude andarranging the poor plants like soldiers at a review. Two long borders were doneduring my absence one day, and when I explained that I should like the third tohave plants in groups and not in lines, and that what I wanted was a naturaleffect with no bare spaces of earth to be seen, he looked even more gloomilyhopeless than usual; and on my going out later on to see the result, I found hehad planted two long borders down the sides of a straight walk with littlelines of five plants in a row—first five pinks, and next to them five rockets,and behind the rockets five pinks, and behind the pinks five rockets, and so onwith different plants of every sort and size down to the end. When I protested,he said he had only carried out my orders and had known it would not look well;so I gave in, and the remaining borders were done after the pattern of thefirst two, and I will have patience and see how they look this summer, beforedigging them up again; for it becomes beginners to be humble.

If I could only dig and plant myself! How much easier, besides being sofascinating, to make your own holes exactly where you want them and put in yourplants exactly as you choose instead of giving orders that can only be halfunderstood from the moment you depart from the lines laid down by that longpiece of string! In the first ecstasy of having a garden all my own, and in myburning impatience to make the waste places blossom like a rose, I did one warmSunday in last year’s April during the servants’ dinner hour, doubly securefrom the gardener by the day and the dinner, slink out with a spade and a rakeand feverishly dig a little piece of ground and break it up and sowsurreptitious ipomæa, and run back very hot and guilty into the house, and getinto a chair and behind a book and look languid just in time to save myreputation. And why not? It is not graceful, and it makes one hot; but it is ablessed sort of work, and if Eve had had a spade in Paradise and known what todo with it, we should not have had all that sad business of the apple.

What a happy woman I am living in a garden, with books, babies, birds, andflowers, and plenty of leisure to enjoy them! Yet my town acquaintances lookupon it as imprisonment, and burying, and I don’t know what besides, and wouldrend the air with their shrieks if condemned to such a life. Sometimes I feelas if I were blest above all my fellows in being able to find my happiness soeasily. I believe I should always be good if the sun always shone, and couldenjoy myself very well in Siberia on a fine day. And what can life in townoffer in the way of pleasure to equal the delight of any one of the calmevenings I have had this month sitting alone at the foot of the verandah steps,with the perfume of young larches all about, and the May moon hanging low overthe beeches, and the beautiful silence made only more profound in its peace bythe croaking of distant frogs and hooting of owls? A cockchafer darting byclose to my ear with a loud hum sends a shiver through me, partly of pleasureat the reminder of past summers, and partly of fear lest he should get caughtin my hair. The Man of Wrath says they are pernicious creatures and should bekilled. I would rather get the killing done at the end of the summer and notcrush them out of such a pretty world at the very beginning of all the fun.

This has been quite an eventful afternoon. My eldest baby, born in April, isfive years old, and the youngest, born in June, is three; so that thediscerning will at once be able to guess the age of the remaining middle or Maybaby. While I was stooping over a group of hollyhocks planted on the top of theonly thing in the shape of a hill the garden possesses, the April baby, who hadbeen sitting pensive on a tree stump close by, got up suddenly and began to runaimlessly about, shrieking and wringing her hands with every symptom of terror.I stared, wondering what had come to her; and then I saw that a whole army ofyoung cows, pasturing in a field next to the garden, had got through the hedgeand were grazing perilously near my tea-roses and most precious belongings. Thenurse and I managed to chase them away, but not before they had trampled down aborder of pinks and lilies in the cruellest way, and made great holes in a bedof China roses, and even begun to nibble at a Jackmanni clematis that I amtrying to persuade to climb up a tree trunk. The gloomy gardener happened to beill in bed, and the assistant was at vespers—as Lutheran Germany callsafternoon tea or its equivalent—so the nurse filled up the holes as well as shecould with mould, burying the crushed and mangled roses, cheated for ever oftheir hopes of summer glory, and I stood by looking on dejectedly. The Junebaby, who is two feet square and valiant beyond her size and years, seized astick much bigger than herself and went after the cows, the cowherd beingnowhere to be seen. She planted herself in front of them brandishing her stick,and they stood in a row and stared at her in great astonishment; and she keptthem off until one of the men from the farm arrived with a whip, and havingfound the cowherd sleeping peacefully in the shade, gave him a sound beating.The cowherd is a great hulking young man, much bigger than the man who beathim, but he took his punishment as part of the day’s work and made no remark ofany sort. It could not have hurt him much through his leather breeches, and Ithink he deserved it; but it must be demoralising work for a strong young manwith no brains looking after cows. Nobody with less imagination than a poetought to take it up as a profession.

After the June baby and I had been welcomed back by the other two with as manyhugs as though we had been restored to them from great perils, and while wewere peacefully drinking tea under a beech tree, I happened to look up into itsmazy green, and there, on a branch quite close to my head, sat a little babyowl. I got on the seat and caught it easily, for it could not fly, and how ithad reached the branch at all is a mystery. It is a little round ball of grayfluff, with the quaintest, wisest, solemn face. Poor thing! I ought to have letit go, but the temptation to keep it until the Man of Wrath, at present on ajourney, has seen it was not to be resisted, as he has often said how much hewould like to have a young owl and try and tame it. So I put it into a roomycage and slung it up on a branch near where it had been sitting, and whichcannot be far from its nest and its mother. We had hardly subsided again to ourtea when I saw two more balls of fluff on the ground in the long grass andscarcely distinguishable at a little distance from small mole-hills. These werepromptly united to their relation in the cage, and now when the Man of Wrathcomes home, not only shall he be welcomed by a wife decked with the orthodoxsmiles, but by the three little longed-for owls. Only it seems wicked to takethem from their mother, and I know that I shall let them go again someday—perhaps the very next time the Man of Wrath goes on a journey. I put asmall pot of water in the cage, though they never could have tasted water yetunless they drink the raindrops off the beech leaves. I suppose they get allthe liquid they need from the bodies of the mice and other dainties providedfor them by their fond parents. But the raindrop idea is prettier.

May15th.—How cruel it was of me to put those poor little owlsinto a cage even for one night! I cannot forgive myself, and shall never panderto the Man of Wrath’s wishes again. This morning I got up early to see how theywere getting on, and I found the door of the cage wide open and no owls to beseen. I thought of course that somebody had stolen them—some boy from thevillage, or perhaps the chastised cowherd. But looking about I saw one perchedhigh up in the branches of the beech tree, and then to my dismay one lying deadon the ground. The third was nowhere to be seen, and is probably safe in itsnest. The parents must have torn at the bars of the cage until by chance theygot the door open, and then dragged the little ones out and up into the tree.The one that is dead must have been blown off the branch, as it was a windynight and its neck is broken. There is one happy life less in the garden to-daythrough my fault, and it is such a lovely, warm day—just the sort of weatherfor young soft things to enjoy and grow in. The babies are greatly distressed,and are digging a grave, and preparing funeral wreaths of dandelions.

Just as I had written that I heard sounds of arrival, and running out Ibreathlessly told the Man of Wrath how nearly I had been able to give him theowls he has so often said he would like to have, and how sorry I was they weregone, and how grievous the death of one, and so on after the voluble manner ofwomen.

He listened till I paused to breathe, and then he said, “I am surprised at suchcruelty. How could you make the mother owl suffer so? She had never done youany harm.”

Which sent me out of the house and into the garden more convinced than everthat he sang true who sang—

Two paradises ’twere in one to live in Paradise alone.

May16th.—The garden is the place I go to for refuge and shelter,not the house. In the house are duties and annoyances, servants to exhort andadmonish, furniture, and meals; but out there blessings crowd round me at everystep—it is there that I am sorry for the unkindness in me, for those selfishthoughts that are so much worse than they feel; it is there that all my sinsand silliness are forgiven, there that I feel protected and at home, and everyflower and weed is a friend and every tree a lover. When I have been vexed Irun out to them for comfort, and when I have been angry without just cause, itis there that I find absolution. Did ever a woman have so many friends? Andalways the same, always ready to welcome me and fill me with cheerful thoughts.Happy children of a common Father, why should I, their own sister, be lesscontent and joyous than they? Even in a thunder storm, when other people arerunning into the house, I run out of it. I do not like thunder storms—theyfrighten me for hours before they come, because I always feel them on the way;but it is odd that I should go for shelter to the garden. I feel better there,more taken care of, more petted. When it thunders, the April baby says,“There’s lieber Gottscolding those angels again.” And once, when therewas a storm in the night, she complained loudly, and wanted to know whylieber Gottdidn’t do the scolding in the daytime, as she had been sotightasleep. They all three speak a wonderful mixture of German andEnglish, adulterating the purity of their native tongue by putting in Englishwords in the middle of a German sentence. It always reminds me of Justicetempered by Mercy.

We have been cowslipping to-day in a little wood dignified by the name of theHirschwald, because it is the happy hunting-ground of innumerable deer whofight there in the autumn evenings, calling each other out to combat withbayings that ring through the silence and send agreeable shivers through thelonely listener. I often walk there in September, late in the evening, andsitting on a fallen tree listen fascinated to their angry cries.

We made cowslip balls sitting on the grass. The babies had never seen suchthings nor had imagined anything half so sweet. The Hirschwald is a little openwood of silver birches and springy turf starred with flowers, and there is atiny stream meandering amiably about it and decking itself in June with yellowflags. I have dreams of having a little cottage built there, with the daisiesup to the door, and no path of any sort—just big enough to hold myself and onebaby inside and a purple clematis outside. Two rooms—a bedroom and a kitchen.How scared we would be at night, and how completely happy by day! I know theexact spot where it should stand, facing south-east, so that we should get allthe cheerfulness of the morning, and close to the stream, so that we might washour plates among the flags. Sometimes, when in the mood for society, we wouldinvite the remaining babies to tea and entertain them with wild strawberries onplates of horse-chestnut leaves; but no one less innocent and easily pleasedthan a baby would be permitted to darken the effulgence of our sunnycottage—indeed, I don’t suppose that anybody wiser would care to come. Wisepeople want so many things before they can even begin to enjoy themselves, andI feel perpetually apologetic when with them, for only being able to offer themthat which I love best myself—apologetic, and ashamed of being so easilycontented.

The other day at a dinner party in the nearest town (it took us the wholeafternoon to get there) the women after dinner were curious to know how I hadendured the winter, cut off from everybody and snowed up sometimes for weeks.

“Ah, these husbands!” sighed an ample lady, lugubriously shaking her head;“they shut up their wives because it suits them, and don’t care what theirsufferings are.”

Then the others sighed and shook their heads too, for the ample lady was agreat local potentate, and one began to tell how another dreadful husband hadbrought his young wife into the country and had kept her there, concealing herbeauty and accomplishments from the public in a most cruel manner, and how,after spending a certain number of years in alternately weeping and producingprogeny, she had quite lately run away with somebody unspeakable—I think it wasthe footman, or the baker, or some one of that sort.

“But I am quite happy,” I began, as soon as I could put in a word.

“Ah, a good little wife, making the best of it,” and the female potentatepatted my hand, but continued gloomily to shake her head.

“You cannot possibly be happy in the winter entirely alone,” asserted anotherlady, the wife of a high military authority and not accustomed to becontradicted.

“But I am.”

“But how can you possibly be at your age? No, it is not possible.”

“But I am.”

“Your husband ought to bring you to town in the winter.”

“But I don’t want to be brought to town.”

“And not let you waste your best years buried.”

“But I like being buried.”

“Such solitude is not right.”

“But I’m not solitary.”

“And can come to no good.” She was getting quite angry.

There was a chorus of No Indeeds at her last remark, and renewed shaking ofheads.

“I enjoyed the winter immensely,” I persisted when they were a little quieter;“I sleighed and skated, and then there were the children, and shelves andshelves full of—” I was going to say books, but stopped. Reading is anoccupation for men; for women it is reprehensible waste of time. And how couldI talk to them of the happiness I felt when the sun shone on the snow, or ofthe deep delight of hoar-frost days?

“It is entirely my doing that we have come down here,” I proceeded, “and myhusband only did it to please me.”

“Such a good little wife,” repeated the patronising potentate, again patting myhand with an air of understanding all about it, “really an excellent littlewife. But you must not let your husband have his own way too much, my dear, andtake my advice and insist on his bringing you to town next winter.” And thenthey fell to talking about their cooks, having settled to their entiresatisfaction that my fate was probably lying in wait for me too, lurkingperhaps at that very moment behind the apparently harmless brass buttons of theman in the hall with my cloak.

I laughed on the way home, and I laughed again for sheer satisfaction when wereached the garden and drove between the quiet trees to the pretty old house;and when I went into the library, with its four windows open to the moonlightand the scent, and looked round at the familiar bookshelves, and could hear nosounds but sounds of peace, and knew that here I might read or dream or idleexactly as I chose with never a creature to disturb me, how grateful I felt tothe kindly Fate that has brought me here and given me a heart to understand myown blessedness, and rescued me from a life like that I had just seen—a lifespent with the odours of other people’s dinners in one’s nostrils, and thenoise of their wrangling servants in one’s ears, and parties and tattle for allamusement.

But I must confess to having felt sometimes quite crushed when some grandperson, examining the details of my home through her eyeglass, and coollydissecting all that I so much prize from the convenient distance of the openwindow, has finished up by expressing sympathy with my loneliness, and on myprotesting that I like it, has murmured, “sehr anspruchslos.” Thenindeed I have felt ashamed of the fewness of my wants; but only for a moment,and only under the withering influence of the eyeglass; for, after all, theowner’s spirit is the same spirit as that which dwells in my servants—girlswhose one idea of happiness is to live in a town where there are others oftheir sort with whom to drink beer and dance on Sunday afternoons. The passionfor being for ever with one’s fellows, and the fear of being left for a fewhours alone, is to me wholly incomprehensible. I can entertain myself quitewell for weeks together, hardly aware, except for the pervading peace, that Ihave been alone at all. Not but what I like to have people staying with me fora few days, or even for a few weeks, should they be as anspruchslosas Iam myself, and content with simple joys; only, any one who comes here and wouldbe happy must have something in him; if he be a mere blank creature, empty ofhead and heart, he will very probably find it dull. I should like my house tobe often full if I could find people capable of enjoying themselves. Theyshould be welcomed and sped with equal heartiness; for truth compels me toconfess that, though it pleases me to see them come, it pleases me just as muchto see them go.

On some very specially divine days, like today, I have actually longed for someone else to be here to enjoy the beauty with me. There has been rain in thenight, and the whole garden seems to be singing—not the untiring birds only,but the vigorous plants, the happy grass and trees, the lilac bushes—oh, thoselilac bushes! They are all out to-day, and the garden is drenched with thescent. I have brought in armfuls, the picking is such a delight, and every potand bowl and tub in the house is filled with purple glory, and the servantsthink there is going to be a party and are extra nimble, and I go from room toroom gazing at the sweetness, and the windows are all flung open so as to jointhe scent within to the scent without; and the servants gradually discover thatthere is no party, and wonder why the house should be filled with flowers forone woman by herself, and I long more and more for a kindred spirit—it seems sogreedy to have so much loveliness to oneself—but kindred spirits are so very,very rare; I might almost as well cry for the moon. It is true that my gardenis full of friends, only they are—dumb.

June3rd.—This is such an out-of-the-way corner of the world thatit requires quite unusual energy to get here at all, and I am thus deliveredfrom casual callers; while, on the other hand, people I love, or people wholove me, which is much the same thing, are not likely to be deterred fromcoming by the roundabout train journey and the long drive at the end. Not theleast of my many blessings is that we have only one neighbour. If you have tohave neighbours at all, it is at least a mercy that there should be only one;for with people dropping in at all hours and wanting to talk to you, how areyou to get on with your life, I should like to know, and read your books, anddream your dreams to your satisfaction? Besides, there is always the certaintythat either you or the dropper-in will say something that would have beenbetter left unsaid, and I have a holy horror of gossip and mischief-making. Awoman’s tongue is a deadly weapon and the most difficult thing in the world tokeep in order, and things slip off it with a facility nothing short ofappalling at the very moment when it ought to be most quiet. In such cases theonly safe course is to talk steadily about cooks and children, and to pray thatthe visit may not be too prolonged, for if it is you are lost. Cooks I havefound to be the best of all subjects—the most phlegmatic flush into life at themere word, and the joys and sufferings connected with them are experiencescommon to us all.

Luckily, our neighbour and his wife are both busy and charming, with a wholetroop of flaxen-haired little children to keep them occupied, besides thebusiness of their large estate. Our intercourse is arranged on lines of themost beautiful simplicity. I call on her once a year, and she returns the calla fortnight later; they ask us to dinner in the summer, and we ask them todinner in the winter. By strictly keeping to this, we avoid all danger of thatcloser friendship which is only another name for frequent quarrels. She is apattern of what a German country lady should be, and is not only a pretty womanbut an energetic and practical one, and the combination is, to say the least,effective. She is up at daylight superintending the feeding of the stock, thebutter-making, the sending off of the milk for sale; a thousand things get donewhile most people are fast asleep, and before lazy folk are well at breakfastshe is off in her pony-carriage to the other farms on the place, to rate the“mamsells,” as the head women are called, to poke into every corner, lift thelids off the saucepans, count the new-laid eggs, and box, if necessary, anycareless dairymaid’s ears. We are allowed by law to administer “slight corporalpunishment” to our servants, it being left entirely to individual taste todecide what “slight” shall be, and my neighbour really seems to enjoy usingthis privilege, judging from the way she talks about it. I would give much tobe able to peep through a keyhole and see the dauntless little lady, terriblein her wrath and dignity, standing on tiptoe to box the ears of some greatstrapping girl big enough to eat her.

The making of cheese and butter and sausages excellentlywell is a workwhich requires brains, and is, to my thinking, a very admirable form ofactivity, and entirely worthy of the attention of the intelligent. That myneighbour is intelligent is at once made evident by the bright alertness of hereyes—eyes that nothing escapes, and that only gain in prettiness by being usedto some good purpose. She is a recognised authority for miles around on themysteries of sausage-making, the care of calves, and the slaughtering of swine;and with all her manifold duties and daily prolonged absences from home, herchildren are patterns of health and neatness, and of what dear little Germanchildren, with white pigtails and fearless eyes and thick legs, should be. Whoshall say that such a life is sordid and dull and unworthy of a high order ofintelligence? I protest that to me it is a beautiful life, full of wholesomeoutdoor work, and with no room for those listless moments of depression andboredom, and of wondering what you will do next, that leave wrinkles round apretty woman’s eyes, and are not unknown even to the most brilliant. But whileadmiring my neighbour, I don’t think I shall ever try to follow in her steps,my talents not being of the energetic and organising variety, but rather ofthat order which makes their owner almost lamentably prone to take up a volumeof poetry and wander out to where the kingcups grow, and, sitting on a willowtrunk beside a little stream, forget the very existence of everything but greenpastures and still waters, and the glad blowing of the wind across the joyousfields. And it would make me perfectly wretched to be confronted by ears sorefractory as to require boxing.

Sometimes callers from a distance invade my solitude, and it is on theseoccasions that I realise how absolutely alone each individual is, and how faraway from his neighbour; and while they talk (generally about babies, past,present, and to come), I fall to wondering at the vast and impassable distancethat separates one’s own soul from the soul of the person sitting in the nextchair. I am speaking of comparative strangers, people who are forced to stay acertain time by the eccentricities of trains, and in whose presence you gropeabout after common interests and shrink back into your shell on finding thatyou have none. Then a frost slowly settles down on me and I grow each minutemore benumbed and speechless, and the babies feel the frost in the air and lookvacant, and the callers go through the usual form of wondering who they mosttake after, generally settling the question by saying that the May baby, who isthe beauty, is like her father, and that the two more or less plain ones arethe image of me, and this decision, though I know it of old and am sure it iscoming, never fails to depress me as much as though I heard it for the firsttime. The babies are very little and inoffensive and good, and it is hard thatthey should be used as a means of filling up gaps in conversation, and theirfeatures pulled to pieces one by one, and all their weak points noted andcriticised, while they stand smiling shyly in the operator’s face, their verysmile drawing forth comments on the shape of their mouths; but, after all, itdoes not occur very often, and they are one of those few interests one has incommon with other people, as everybody seems to have babies. A garden, I havediscovered, is by no means a fruitful topic, and it is amazing how few personsreally love theirs—they all pretend they do, but you can hear by the very toneof their voice what a lukewarm affection it is. About June their interest is atits warmest, nourished by agreeable supplies of strawberries and roses; but onreflection I don’t know a single person within twenty miles who really caresfor his garden, or has discovered the treasures of happiness that are buried init, and are to be found if sought for diligently, and if needs be with tears.It is after these rare calls that I experience the only moments of depressionfrom which I ever suffer, and then I am angry at myself, a well-nourishedperson, for allowing even a single precious hour of life to be spoilt byanything so indifferent. That is the worst of being fed enough, and clothedenough, and warmed enough, and of having everything you can reasonablydesire—on the least provocation you are made uncomfortable and unhappy by suchabstract discomforts as being shut out from a nearer approach to yourneighbour’s soul; which is on the face of it foolish, the probability beingthat he hasn’t got one.

The rockets are all out. The gardener, in a fit of inspiration, put them rightalong the very front of two borders, and I don’t know what his feelings can benow that they are all flowering and the plants behind are completely hidden;but I have learned another lesson, and no future gardener shall be allowed torun riot among my rockets in quite so reckless a fashion. They are charmingthings, as delicate in colour as in scent, and a bowl of them on mywriting-table fills the room with fragrance. Single rows, however, are amistake; I had masses of them planted in the grass, and these show how lovelythey can be. A border full of rockets, mauve and white, and nothing else, mustbe beautiful; but I don’t know how long they last nor what they look like whenthey have done flowering. This I shall find out in a week or two, I suppose.Was ever a would-be gardener left so entirely to his own blundering? No doubtit would be a gain of years to the garden if I were not forced to learn solelyby my failures, and if I had some kind creature to tell me when to do things.At present the only flowers in the garden are the rockets, the pansies in therose beds, and two groups of azaleas—mollis and pontica. The azaleas have beenand still are gorgeous; I only planted them this spring and they almost at oncebegan to flower, and the sheltered corner they are in looks as though it werefilled with imprisoned and perpetual sunsets. Orange, lemon, pink in everydelicate shade—what they will be next year and in succeeding years when thebushes are bigger, I can imagine from the way they have begun life. On gray,dull days the effect is absolutely startling. Next autumn I shall make a greatbank of them in front of a belt of fir trees in rather a gloomy nook. Mytea-roses are covered with buds which will not open for at least another week,so I conclude this is not the sort of climate where they will flower from thevery beginning of June to November, as they are said to do.

July11th.—There has been no rain since the day beforeWhitsunday, five weeks ago, which partly, but not entirely, accounts for thedisappointment my beds have been. The dejected gardener went mad soon afterWhitsuntide, and had to be sent to an asylum. He took to going about with aspade in one hand and a revolver in the other, explaining that he felt saferthat way, and we bore it quite patiently, as becomes civilised beings whorespect each other’s prejudices, until one day, when I mildly asked him to tieup a fallen creeper—and after he bought the revolver my tones in addressing himwere of the mildest, and I quite left off reading to him aloud—he turned round,looked me straight in the face for the first time since he has been here, andsaid, “Do I look like Graf X———— (a great local celebrity), or like a monkey?”After which there was nothing for it but to get him into an asylum asexpeditiously as possible. There was no gardener to be had in his place, and Ihave only just succeeded in getting one; so that what with the drought, and theneglect, and the gardener’s madness, and my blunders, the garden is in a sadcondition; but even in a sad condition it is the dearest place in the world,and all my mistakes only make me more determined to persevere.

The long borders, where the rockets were, are looking dreadful. The rocketshave done flowering, and, after the manner of rockets in other walks of life,have degenerated into sticks; and nothing else in those borders intends tobloom this summer. The giant poppies I had planted out in them in April haveeither died off or remained quite small, and so have the columbines; here andthere a delphinium droops unwillingly, and that is all. I suppose poppiescannot stand being moved, or perhaps they were not watered enough at the timeof transplanting; anyhow, those borders are going to be sown to-morrow withmore poppies for next year; for poppies I will have, whether they like it ornot, and they shall not be touched, only thinned out.

Well, it is no use being grieved, and after all, directly I come out and situnder the trees, and look at the dappled sky, and see the sunshine on thecornfields away on the plain, all the disappointment smooths itself out, and itseems impossible to be sad and discontented when everything about me is soradiant and kind.

To-day is Sunday, and the garden is so quiet, that, sitting here in this shadycorner watching the lazy shadows stretching themselves across the grass, andlistening to the rooks quarrelling in the treetops, I almost expect to hearEnglish church bells ringing for the afternoon service. But the church is threemiles off, has no bells, and no afternoon service. Once a fortnight we go tomorning prayer at eleven and sit up in a sort of private box with a roombehind, whither we can retire unobserved when the sermon is too long or ourflesh too weak, and hear ourselves being prayed for by the black-robed parson.In winter the church is bitterly cold; it is not heated, and we sit muffled upin more furs than ever we wear out of doors; but it would of course be verywicked for the parson to wear furs, however cold he may be, so he puts on agreat many extra coats under his gown, and, as the winter progresses, swells toa prodigious size. We know when spring is coming by the reduction in hisfigure. The congregation sit at ease while the parson does the praying forthem, and while they are droning the long-drawn-out chorales, he retires into alittle wooden box just big enough to hold him. He does not come out until hethinks we have sung enough, nor do we stop until his appearance gives us thesignal. I have often thought how dreadful it would be if he fell ill in his boxand left us to go on singing. I am sure we should never dare to stop,unauthorised by the Church. I asked him once what he did in there; he lookedvery shocked at such a profane question, and made an evasive reply.

If it were not for the garden, a German Sunday would be a terrible day; but inthe garden on that day there is a sigh of relief and more profound peace,nobody raking or sweeping or fidgeting; only the little flowers themselves andthe whispering trees.

I have been much afflicted again lately by visitors—not stray callers to be gotrid of after a due administration of tea and things you are sorry afterwardsthat you said, but people staying in the house and not to be got rid of at all.All June was lost to me in this way, and it was from first to last a radiantmonth of heat and beauty; but a garden where you meet the people you saw atbreakfast, and will see again at lunch and dinner, is not a place to be happyin. Besides, they had a knack of finding out my favourite seats and lounging inthem just when I longed to lounge myself; and they took books out of thelibrary with them, and left them face downwards on the seats all night to getwell drenched with dew, though they might have known that what is meat forroses is poison for books; and they gave me to understand that if they had hadthe arranging of the garden it would have been finished long ago—whereas Idon’t believe a garden ever is finished. They have all gone now, thank heaven,except one, so that I have a little breathing space before others begin toarrive. It seems that the place interests people, and that there is a sort ofnovelty in staying in such a deserted corner of the world, for they were in aperpetual state of mild amusement at being here at all.

Irais is the only one left. She is a young woman with a beautiful, refinedface, and her eyes and straight, fine eyebrows are particularly lovable. Atmeals she dips her bread into the salt-cellar, bites a bit off, and repeats theprocess, although providence (taking my shape) has caused salt-spoons to beplaced at convenient intervals down the table. She lunched to-day on beer,Schweinekoteletten, and cabbage-salad with caraway seeds in it, and nowI hear her through the open window, extemporising touching melodies in hercharming, cooing voice. She is thin, frail, intelligent, and lovable, all onthe above diet. What better proof can be needed to establish the superiority ofthe Teuton than the fact that after such meals he can produce such music?Cabbage salad is a horrid invention, but I don’t doubt its utility as a meansof encouraging thoughtfulness; nor will I quarrel with it, since it results sopoetically, any more than I quarrel with the manure that results in roses, andI give it to Irais every day to make her sing. She is the sweetest singer Ihave ever heard, and has a charming trick of making up songs as she goes along.When she begins, I go and lean out of the window and look at my little friendsout there in the borders while listening to her music, and feel full ofpleasant sadness and regret. It is so sweet to be sad when one has nothing tobe sad about.

The April baby came panting up just as I had written that, the others hurryingalong behind, and with flaming cheeks displayed for my admiration threebrand-new kittens, lean and blind, that she was carrying in her pinafore, andthat had just been found motherless in the woodshed.

“Look,” she cried breathlessly, “such a much!”

I was glad it was only kittens this time, for she had been once before thisafternoon on purpose, as she informed me, sitting herself down on the grass atmy feet, to ask about the lieber Gott, it being Sunday and her piouslittle nurse’s conversation having run, as it seems, on heaven and angels.

Her questions about the lieber Gottare better left unrecorded, and Iwas relieved when she began about the angels.

“What do they wear for clothes?” she asked in her German-English.

“Why, you’ve seen them in pictures,” I answered, “in beautiful, long dresses,and with big, white wings.”

“Feathers?” she asked.

“I suppose so,—and long dresses, all white and beautiful.”

“Are they girlies?”

“Girls? Ye—es.”

“Don’t boys go into the Himmel?”

“Yes, of course, if they’re good.”

“And then what do theywear?”

“Why, the same as all the other angels, I suppose.”

“Dwesses?”

She began to laugh, looking at me sideways as though she suspected me of makingjokes. “What a funny Mummy!” she said, evidently much amused. She has a fatlittle laugh that is very infectious.

“I think,” said I, gravely, “you had better go and play with the other babies.”

She did not answer, and sat still a moment watching the clouds. I began writingagain.

“Mummy,” she said presently.

“Well?”

“Where do the angels get their dwesses?”

I hesitated. “From lieber Gott,” I said.

“Are there shops in the Himmel?”

“Shops? No.”

“But, then, where does lieber Gottbuy their dwesses?”

“Now run away like a good baby; I’m busy.”

“But you said yesterday, when I asked about lieber Gott, that you wouldtell about Him on Sunday, and it is Sunday. Tell me a story about Him.”

There was nothing for it but resignation, so I put down my pencil with a sigh.“Call the others, then.”

She ran away, and presently they all three emerged from the bushes one afterthe other, and tried all together to scramble on to my knee. The April baby gotthe knee as she always seems to get everything, and the other two had to sit onthe grass.

I began about Adam and Eve, with an eye to future parsonic probings. The Aprilbaby’s eyes opened wider and wider, and her face grew redder and redder. I wassurprised at the breathless interest she took in the story—the other two weretearing up tufts of grass and hardly listening. I had scarcely got to theangels with the flaming swords and announced that that was all, when she burstout, “Now I’lltell about it. Once upon a time there was Adam and Eva,and they had plentyof clothes, and there was no snake, and lieberGottwasn’t angry with them, and they could eat as many apples as theyliked, and was happy for ever and ever—there now!”

She began to jump up and down defiantly on my knee.

“But that’s not the story,” I said rather helplessly.

“Yes, yes! It’s a much nicelier one! Now another.”

“But these stories are true,” I said severely; “and it’s no use mytelling them if you make them up your own way afterwards.”

“Another! another!” she shrieked, jumping up and down with redoubled energy,all her silvery curls flying.

I began about Noah and the flood.

“Did it rain sobadly?” she asked with a face of the deepest concern andinterest.

“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, greatlyrelieved; “you must all go to Anna now and have tea.”

“I don’t like Anna,” remarked the June baby, not having hitherto opened herlips; “she is a stupid girl.”

The other two stood transfixed with horror at this statement, for, besidesbeing naturally extremely polite, and at all times anxious not to hurt anyone’s feelings, they had been brought up to love and respect their kind littlenurse.

The April baby recovered her speech first, and lifting her finger, pointed itat the criminal in just indignation. “Such a child will never go into theHimmel,” she said with great emphasis, and the air of one who deliversjudgment.

September15th.—This is the month of quiet days, crimsoncreepers, and blackberries; of mellow afternoons in the ripening garden; of teaunder the acacias instead of the too shady beeches; of wood-fires in thelibrary in the chilly evenings. The babies go out in the afternoon andblackberry in the hedges; the three kittens, grown big and fat, sit cleaningthemselves on the sunny verandah steps; the Man of Wrath shoots partridgesacross the distant stubble; and the summer seems as though it would dream onfor ever. It is hard to believe that in three months we shall probably besnowed up and certainly be cold. There is a feeling about this month thatreminds me of March and the early days of April, when spring is stillhesitating 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 lookas then; but the leaves tell a different tale, and the reddening creeper on thehouse is rapidly approaching its last and loveliest glory.

My roses have behaved as well on the whole as was to be expected, and theViscountess Folkestones and Laurette Messimys have been most beautiful, thelatter being quite the loveliest things in the garden, each flower an exquisiteloose cluster of coral-pink petals, paling at the base to a yellow-white. Ihave ordered a hundred standard tea-roses for planting next month, half ofwhich are Viscountess Folkestones, because the tea-roses have such a way ofhanging their little heads that one has to kneel down to be able to see themwell in the dwarf forms—not but what I entirely approve of kneeling before suchperfect beauty, only it dirties one’s clothes. So I am going to put standardsdown each side of the walk under the south windows, and shall have the flowerson a convenient level for worship. My only fear is, that they will stand thewinter 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 thetea-roses; they only flower twice in the season and all the rest of the timelook dull and moping; and then the Persian Yellows have such an odd smell andso many insects inside them eating them up. I have ordered Safrano tea-roses toput in their place, as they all come out next month and are to be grouped inthe grass; and the semicircle being immediately under the windows, besideshaving the best position in the place, must be reserved solely for my choicesttreasures. I have had a great many disappointments, but feel as though I werereally beginning to learn. Humility, and the most patient perseverance, seemalmost as necessary in gardening as rain and sunshine, and every failure mustbe used as a stepping-stone to something better.

I had a visitor last week who knows a great deal about gardening and has hadmuch practical experience. When I heard he was coming, I felt I wanted to putmy arms right round my garden and hide it from him; but what was my surpriseand delight when he said, after having gone all over it, “Well, I think youhave 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 thesummer. I could have hugged that discerning and indulgent critic, able to lookbeyond the result to the intention, and appreciating the difficulties of everykind that had been in the way. After that I opened my heart to him, andlistened reverently to all he had to say, and treasured up his kind andencouraging advice, and wished he could stay here a whole year and help methrough the seasons. But he went, as people one likes always do go, and he wasthe 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 Ican at any time fill the house with visitors about whom I know little and careless. Perhaps, if I saw more of those absent ones, I would not love them sowell—at least, that is what I think on wet days when the wind is howling roundthe house and all nature is overcome with grief; and it has actually happenedonce 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 supposethe fact is, that no friendship can stand the breakfast test, and here, in thecountry, we invariably think it our duty to appear at breakfast. Civilisationhas done away with curl-papers, yet at that hour the soul of theHausfrauis as tightly screwed up in them as was ever her grandmother’shair; and though my body comes down mechanically, having been trained that wayby punctual parents, my soul never thinks of beginning to wake up for otherpeople till lunch-time, and never does so completely till it has been taken outof doors and aired in the sunshine. Who can begin conventional amiability thefirst thing in the morning? It is the hour of savage instincts and naturaltendencies; it is the triumph of the Disagreeable and the Cross. I am convincedthat the Muses and the Graces never thought of having breakfast anywhere but inbed.

November11th.—When the gray November weather came, and hung itssoft dark clouds low and unbroken over the brown of the ploughed fields and thevivid emerald of the stretches of winter corn, the heavy stillness weighed myheart down to a forlorn yearning after the pleasant things of childhood, thepetting, the comforting, the warming faith in the unfailing wisdom of elders. Agreat need of something to lean on, and a great weariness of independence andresponsibility took possession of my soul; and looking round for support andcomfort in that transitory mood, the emptiness of the present and the blanknessof the future sent me back to the past with all its ghosts. Why should I not goand see the place where I was born, and where I lived so long; the place whereI was so magnificently happy, so exquisitely wretched, so close to heaven, sonear to hell, always either up on a cloud of glory, or down in the depths withthe waters of despair closing over my head? Cousins live in it now, distantcousins, loved with the exact measure of love usually bestowed on cousins whoreign in one’s stead; cousins of practical views, who have dug up theflower-beds and planted cabbages where roses grew; and though through all theyears since my father’s death I have held my head so high that it hurt, andloftily refused to listen to their repeated suggestions that I should revisitmy old home, something in the sad listlessness of the November days sent myspirit back to old times with a persistency that would not be set aside, and Iwoke from my musings surprised to find myself sick with longing. It is foolishbut natural to quarrel with one’s cousins, and especially foolish and naturalwhen they have done nothing, and are mere victims of chance. Is it their faultthat my not being a boy placed the shoes I should otherwise have stepped intoat their disposal? I know it is not; but their blamelessness does not make melove them more. “Noch ein dummes Frauenzimmer!” cried my father, on myarrival into the world—he had three of them already, and I was his lasthope,—and a dummes FrauenzimmerI have remained ever since; and that iswhy for years I would have no dealings with the cousins in possession, and thatis why, the other day, overcome by the tender influence of the weather, thepurely sentimental longing to join hands again with my childhood was enough tosend all my pride to the winds, and to start me off without warning and withoutinvitation on my pilgrimage.

I have always had a liking for pilgrimages, and if I had lived in the MiddleAges would have spent most of my time on the way to Rome. The pilgrims, leavingall their cares at home, the anxieties of their riches or their debts, the wifethat 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, startingon a fine morning, with the smell of the spring in my nostrils, fortified bythe approval of those left behind, accompanied by the pious blessings of myfamily, 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, sopenitent, and so happy! My dream, even now, is to walk for weeks with somefriend that I love, leisurely wandering from place to place, with no routearranged and no object in view, with liberty to go on all day or to linger allday, 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 isthe certain censure of relatives, who, not fond of walking themselves, andhaving no taste for noonday naps under hedges, would be sure to paralyse myplans before they had grown to maturity by the honest horror of their cry, “Howvery unpleasant if you were to meet any one you know!” The relative of fivehundred years back would simply have said, “How holy!”

My father had the same liking for pilgrimages—indeed, it is evident that I haveit from him—and he encouraged it in me when I was little, taking me with him onhis pious journeys to places he had lived in as a boy. Often have we beentogether to the school he was at in Brandenburg, and spent pleasant dayswandering about the old town on the edge of one of those lakes that lie in achain in that wide green plain; and often have we been in Potsdam, where he wasquartered as a lieutenant, the Potsdam pilgrimage including hours in the woodsaround and in the gardens of Sans Souci, with the second volume of Carlyle’sFrederick under my father’s arm; and often did we spend long summer days at thehouse in the Mark, at the head of the same blue chain of lakes, where hismother spent her young years, and where, though it belonged to cousins, likeeverything else that was worth having, we could wander about as we chose, forit was empty, and sit in the deep windows of rooms where there was nofurniture, and the painted Venuses and cupids on the ceiling still smiledirrelevantly and stretched their futile wreaths above the emptiness beneath.And while we sat and rested, my father told me, as my grandmother had a hundredtimes told him, all that had happened in those rooms in the far-off days whenpeople danced and sang and laughed through life, and nobody seemed ever to beold 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 ourarrival at a little table spread with a red and blue check cloth, the limeblossoms dropping into our soup, and the bees humming in the scented shadowsoverhead. I have a picture of the house by my side as I write, done from thelake in old times, with a boat full of ladies in hoops and powder in theforeground, and a youth playing a guitar. The pilgrimages to this place werethose I loved the best.

But the stories my father told me, sometimes odd enough stories to tell alittle girl, as we wandered about the echoing rooms, or hung over the stonebalustrade and fed the fishes in the lake, or picked the pale dog-roses in thehedges, or lay in the boat in a shady reed-grown bay while he smoked to keepthe mosquitoes off, were after all only traditions, imparted to me in smalldoses from time to time, when his earnest desire not to raise his remarks abovethe level of dulness supposed to be wholesome for Backfischewasneutralised 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 withliving, first-hand memories of all the enchanted years that lie between two andeighteen. How enchanted those years are is made more and more clear to me theolder I grow. There has been nothing in the least like them since; and though Ihave forgotten most of what happened six months ago, every incident, almostevery day of those wonderful long years is perfectly distinct in my memory.

But I had been stiffnecked, proud, unpleasant, altogether cousinly in mybehaviour towards the people in possession. The invitations to revisit the oldhome had ceased. The cousins had grown tired of refusals, and had left mealone. I did not even know who lived in it now, it was so long since I had hadany news. For two days I fought against the strong desire to go there that hadsuddenly seized me, and assured myself that I would not go, that it would beabsurd to go, undignified, sentimental, and silly, that I did not know them andwould be in an awkward position, and that I was old enough to know better. Butwho can foretell from one hour to the next what a woman will do? And when doesshe ever know better? On the third morning I set out as hopefully as though itwere the most natural thing in the world to fall unexpectedly upon hithertoconsistently 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; andthought with wonder of the long years I had allowed to pass since last I wasthere. Of what I should say to the cousins, and of how I should introducemyself into their midst, I did not think at all: the pilgrim spirit was uponme, the unpractical spirit that takes no thought for anything, but simplywanders along enjoying its own emotions. It was a quiet, sad morning, and therewas a thick mist. By the time I was in the little train on the light railwaythat passed through the village nearest my old home, I had got over my firstenthusiasm, and had entered the stage of critically examining the changes thathad been made in the last ten years. It was so misty that I could see nothingof the familiar country from the carriage windows, only the ghosts of pines inthe 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 forestroads to and from the station, and although most people would have called it anevident and great improvement, it was an innovation due, no doubt, to the zealand energy of the reigning cousin; and who was he, thought I, that he shouldrequire more conveniences than my father had found needful? It was no use mytelling myself that in my father’s time the era of light railways had notdawned, and that if it had, we should have done our utmost to secure one; thethought of my cousin, stepping into my shoes, and then altering them, wasodious to me. By the time I was walking up the hill from the station I had gotover this feeling too, and had entered a third stage of wondering uneasily whatin the world I should do next. Where was the intrepid courage with which I hadstarted? At the top of the first hill I sat down to consider this question indetail, 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 completelythat I could only suppose that it must be lunch time, the observations of yearshaving led to the discovery that the higher sentiments and virtues flyaffrighted on the approach of lunch, and none fly quicker than courage. So Iate the lunch I had brought with me, hoping that it was what I wanted; but itwas chilly, made up of sandwiches and pears, and it had to be eaten under atree at the edge of a field; and it was November, and the mist was thicker thanever and very wet—the grass was wet with it, the gaunt tree was wet with it, Iwas wet with it, and the sandwiches were wet with it. Nobody’s spirits can keepup under such conditions; and as I ate the soaked sandwiches, I deplored theheadlong courage more with each mouthful that had torn me from a warm, dry homewhere I was appreciated, and had brought me first to the damp tree in the dampfield, and when I had finished my lunch and dessert of cold pears, was going todrag me into the midst of a circle of unprepared and astonished cousins. Vastsheep loomed through the mist a few yards off. The sheep dog kept up aperpetual, irritating yap. In the fog I could hardly tell where I was, though Iknew I must have played there a hundred times as a child. After the fashion ofwoman directly she is not perfectly warm and perfectly comfortable, I began toconsider the uncertainty of human life, and to shake my head in gloomy approvalas 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 theway consecrated by custom, more especially if you are a woman. The rattle of acarriage along the road just behind me, and the fact that I started and turnedsuddenly hot, drove this truth home to my soul. The mist hid me, and thecarriage, no doubt full of cousins, drove on in the direction of the house; butwhat an absurd position I was in! Suppose the kindly mist had lifted, andrevealed me lunching in the wet on their property, the cousin of the short andlofty letters, the unangenehme Elisabeth!“Die war doch immerverdreht,” I could imagine them hastily muttering to each other, beforeadvancing wreathed in welcoming smiles. It gave me a great shock, this narrowescape, and I got on to my feet quickly, and burying the remains of my lunchunder the gigantic molehill on which I had been sitting, asked myself nervouslywhat I proposed to do next. Should I walk back to the village, go to theGasthof, write a letter craving permission to call on my cousins, andwait there till an answer came? It would be a discreet and sober course topursue; the next best thing to having written before leaving home. But theGasthofof a north German village is a dreadful place, and theremembrance of one in which I had taken refuge once from a thunderstorm wasstill so vivid that nature itself cried out against this plan. The mist, ifanything, was growing denser. I knew every path and gate in the place. What ifI gave up all hope of seeing the house, and went through the little door in thewall at the bottom of the garden, and confined myself for this once to that? Insuch weather I would be able to wander round as I pleased, without the leastrisk of being seen by or meeting any cousins, and it was after all the gardenthat lay nearest my heart. What a delight it would be to creep into itunobserved, and revisit all the corners I so well remembered, and slip outagain and get away safely without any need of explanations, assurances,protestations, displays of affection, without any need, in a word, of thatexhausting form of conversation, so dear to relations, known asRedensarten!

The mist tempted me. I think if it had been a fine day I would have gonesoberly to the Gasthofand written the conciliatory letter; but thetemptation was too great, it was altogether irresistible, and in ten minutes Ihad found the gate, opened it with some difficulty, and was standing with abeating heart in the garden of my childhood.

Now I wonder whether I shall ever again feel thrills of the same potency asthose that ran through me at that moment. First of all I was trespassing, whichis in itself thrilling; but how much more thrilling when you are trespassing onwhat might just as well have been your own ground, on what actually was foryears your own ground, and when you are in deadly peril of seeing the rightfulowners, whom you have never met, but with whom you have quarrelled, appearround the corner, and of hearing them remark with an inquiring and awfulpoliteness “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 hadalways been just there; they curled away on either side among the shrubs, withthe brown tracks of recent footsteps in the centre of their green stains, justas they did in my day. The overgrown lilac bushes still met above my head. Themoisture dripped from the same ledge in the wall on to the sodden leavesbeneath, 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 tome. Nobody ever came to it, for in winter it was too dreary, and in summer sofull of mosquitoes that only a Backfischindifferent to spots could haveborne it. But it was a place where I could play unobserved, and where I couldwalk up and down uninterrupted for hours, building castles in the air. Therewas an unwholesome little arbour in one dark corner, much frequented by thelarger black slug, where I used to pass glorious afternoons making plans. I wasfor ever making plans, and if nothing came of them, what did it matter? Themere making had been a joy. To me this out-of-the-way corner was always awonderful and a mysterious place, where my castles in the air stood closetogether in radiant rows, and where the strangest and most splendid adventuresbefell me; for the hours I passed in it and the people I met in it were allenchanted.

Standing there and looking round with happy eyes, I forgot the existence of thecousins. I could have cried for joy at being there again. It was the home of myfathers, the home that would have been mine if I had been a boy, the home thatwas mine now by a thousand tender and happy and miserable associations, ofwhich the people in possession could not dream. They were tenants, but it wasmy home. I threw my arms round the trunk of a very wet fir tree, every branchof which I remembered, for had I not climbed it, and fallen from it, and tornand bruised myself on it uncountable numbers of times? and I gave it such ahearty kiss that my nose and chin were smudged into one green stain, and stillI did not care. Far from caring, it filled me with a reckless, Backfischpleasure 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 Ipassed through that magic door. Bad habits cling to us, however, with suchpersistency that I did mechanically pull out my handkerchief and begin to ruboff the welcoming smudge, a thing I never would have dreamed of doing in theglorious old days; but an artful scent of violets clinging to the handkerchiefbrought me to my senses, and with a sudden impulse of scorn, the fine scorn forscent of every honest Backfisch, I rolled it up into a ball and flung itaway into the bushes, where I daresay it is at this moment. “Away with you,” Icried, “away with you, symbol of conventionality, of slavery, of pandering to adesire to please—away with you, miserable little lace-edged rag!” And so younghad I grown within the last few minutes that I did not even feel silly.

As a BackfischI had never used handkerchiefs—the child of nature scornsto blow its nose—though for decency’s sake my governess insisted on giving me aclean one of vast size and stubborn texture on Sundays. It was stowed awayunfolded in the remotest corner of my pocket, where it was gradually pressedinto a beautiful compactness by the other contents, which were knives. After awhile, I remember, the handkerchief being brought to light on Sundays to makeroom for a successor, and being manifestly perfectly clean, we came to anagreement that it should only be changed on the first and third Sundays in themonth, on condition that I promised to turn it on the other Sundays. Mygoverness said that the outer folds became soiled from the mere contact withthe other things in my pocket, and that visitors might catch sight of thesoiled side if it was never turned when I wished to blow my nose in theirpresence, and that one had no right to give one’s visitors shocks. “But I neverdo 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 profoundstillness of the dripping little shrubbery frightened me. It was so still thatI was afraid to move; so still, that I could count each drop of moisturefalling from the oozing wall; so still, that when I held my breath to listen, Iwas deafened by my own heart-beats. I made a step forward in the directionwhere the arbour ought to be, and the rustling and jingling of my clothesterrified me into immobility. The house was only two hundred yards off; and ifany one had been about, the noise I had already made opening the creaking doorand so foolishly apostrophising my handkerchief must have been noticed. Supposean inquiring gardener, or a restless cousin, should presently loom through thefog, bearing down upon me? Suppose Fräulein Wundermacher should pounce upon mesuddenly from behind, coming up noiselessly in her galoshes, and shatter mycastles with her customary triumphant “Jetzt halte ich dich aber fest!”Why, what was I thinking of? Fräulein Wundermacher, so big and masterful, suchan enemy of day-dreams, such a friend of das Praktische, such a lover ofcreature comforts, had died long ago, had been succeeded long ago by others,German sometimes, and sometimes English, and sometimes at intervals French, andthey too had all in their turn vanished, and I was here a solitary ghost.“Come, Elizabeth,” said I to myself impatiently, “are you actually growingsentimental over your governesses? If you think you are a ghost, be glad atleast that you are a solitary one. Would you like the ghosts of all those poorwomen you tormented to rise up now in this gloomy place against you? And do youintend 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 thelittle 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 mypetticoats, but determined to see what I had come to see and not to be scaredaway by phantoms.

How regretfully did I think at that moment of the petticoats of my youth, soshort, so silent, and so woollen! And how convenient the canvas shoes were withthe india rubber soles, for creeping about without making a sound! Thanks tothem I could always run swiftly and unheard into my hiding-places, and staythere listening to the garden resounding with cries of “Elizabeth! Elizabeth!Come in at once to your lessons!” Or, at a different period, “Où êtes-vousdonc, petite sotte?” Or at yet another period, “Warte nur, wenn ich dicherst habe!” As the voices came round one corner, I whisked in my noiselessclothes round the next, and it was only Fräulein Wundermacher, a person ofresource, who discovered that all she needed for my successful circumventionwas galoshes. She purchased a pair, wasted no breath calling me, and would comeup silently, as I stood lapped in a false security lost in the contemplation ofa squirrel or a robin, and seize me by the shoulders from behind, to thegrievous unhinging of my nerves. Stealing along in the fog, I looked backuneasily once or twice, so vivid was this disquieting memory, and could hardlybe reassured by putting up my hand to the elaborate twists and curls thatcompose what my maid calls my Frisur, and that mark the gulf lyingbetween the present and the past; for it had happened once or twice, awful torelate and to remember, that Fräulein Wundermacher, sooner than let me slipthrough her fingers, had actually caught me by the long plait of hair to whoseother 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 sohad led me home triumphant, holding on tight to the rope of hair, and mutteringwith a broad smile of special satisfaction, “Diesmal wirst du mir aber nichtentschlüpfen!” Fräulein Wundermacher, now I came to think of it, must havebeen a humourist. She was certainly a clever and a capable woman. But I wishedat that moment that she would not haunt me so persistently, and that I couldget rid of the feeling that she was just behind in her galoshes, with her handstretched out to seize me.

Passing the arbour, and peering into its damp recesses, I started back with myheart in my mouth. I thought I saw my grandfather’s stern eyes shining in thedarkness. It was evident that my anxiety lest the cousins should catch me hadquite upset my nerves, for I am not by nature inclined to see eyes where eyesare not. “Don’t be foolish, Elizabeth,” murmured my soul in rather a faintvoice, “go in, and make sure.” “But I don’t like going in and making sure,” Ireplied. I did go in, however, with a sufficient show of courage, andfortunately the eyes vanished. What I should have done if they had not I amaltogether unable to imagine. Ghosts are things that I laugh at in the daytimeand fear at night, but I think if I were to meet one I should die. The arbourhad fallen into great decay, and was in the last stage of mouldiness. Mygrandfather had had it made, and, like other buildings, it enjoyed a period ofprosperity before being left to the ravages of slugs and children, when he camedown every afternoon in summer and drank his coffee there and read hisKreuzzeitungand dozed, while the rest of us went about on tiptoe, andonly the birds dared sing. Even the mosquitoes that infested the place were toomuch in awe of him to sting him; they certainly never did sting him, and Inaturally concluded it must be because he had forbidden such familiarities.Although I had played there for so many years since his death, my memoryskipped 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 himnow from the impressions he made then on my child’s mind, though I was notconscious of them for more than twenty years. Nobody told me about him, and hedied when I was six, and yet within the last year or two, that strange Indiansummer of remembrance that comes to us in the leisured times when the childrenhave 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 theparent, but of a salutary and restraining nature, that though children may notunderstand what is said and done before them, and have no interest in it at thetime, and though they may forget it at once and for years, yet these thingsthat they have seen and heard and not noticed have after all impressedthemselves for ever on their minds, and when they are men and women comecrowding back with surprising and often painful distinctness, and away friskall the cherished little illusions in flocks.

I had an awful reverence for my grandfather. He never petted, and he oftenfrowned, 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 chosenwas held to be a convincing proof of his greatness; for he was plainly toogreat to be great in the vulgar sense, and shrouded himself in the dignity ofprivacy and potentialities. This, at least, as time passed and he still didnothing, was the belief of the simple people around. People must believe insomebody, and having pinned their faith on my grandfather in the promisingyears that lie round thirty, it was more convenient to let it remain there. Hepervaded our family life till my sixth year, and saw to it that we all behavedourselves, and then he died, and we were glad that he should be in heaven. Hewas a good German (and when Germans are good they are very good) who kept thecommandments, voted for the Government, grew prize potatoes and bredinnumerable sheep, drove to Berlin once a year with the wool in a procession ofwaggons behind him and sold it at the annual Wollmarkt, rioted soberly for afew days there, and then carried most of the proceeds home, hunted as often aspossible, helped his friends, punished his children, read his Bible, said hisprayers, and was genuinely astonished when his wife had the affectation to dieof a broken heart. I cannot pretend to explain this conduct. She ought, ofcourse, to have been happy in the possession of so good a man; but good men aresometimes oppressive, and to have one in the house with you and to live in thedaily glare of his goodness must be a tremendous business. After bearing himseven sons and three daughters, therefore, my grandmother died in the waydescribed, and afforded, said my grandfather, another and a very curious proofof the impossibility of ever being sure of your ground with women. The incidentfaded more quickly from his mind than it might otherwise have done for itshaving occurred simultaneously with the production of a new kind of potato, ofwhich he was justly proud. He called it Trost in Trauer, and quoted thetext of Scripture Auge um Auge, Zabn um Zahn, after which he did notagain allude to his wife’s decease. In his last years, when my father managedthe estate, and he only lived with us and criticised, he came to have thereputation of an oracle. The neighbours sent him their sons at the beginning ofany important phase in their lives, and he received them in this very arbour,administering eloquent and minute advice in the deep voice that rolled roundthe shrubbery and filled me with a vague sense of guilt as I played. Sittingamong the bushes playing muffled games for fear of disturbing him, I supposedhe 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 bymosquitoes, and looking bewildered; and when they had got over the impressionmade by my grandfather’s speech and presence, no doubt forgot all he had saidwith wholesome quickness, and set themselves to the interesting and necessarywork of gaining their own experience. Once, indeed, a dreadful thing happened,whose immediate consequence was the abrupt end to the long and close friendshipbetween us and our nearest neighbour. His son was brought to the arbour andleft there in the usual way, and either he must have happened on the criticalhalf hour after the coffee and before the Kreuzzeitung, when mygrandfather was accustomed to sleep, or he was more courageous than the othersand tried to talk, for very shortly, playing as usual near at hand, I heard mygrandfather’s voice, raised to an extent that made me stop in my game andquake, saying with deliberate anger, “Hebe dich weg von mir, Sohn desSatans!” Which was all the advice this particular young man got, and whichhe hastened to take, for out he came through the bushes, and though his facewas very pale, there was an odd twist about the corners of his mouth thatreassured me.

This must have happened quite at the end of my grandfather’s life, for almostimmediately afterwards, as it now seems to me, he died before he need have donebecause he would eat crab, a dish that never agreed with him, in the face ofhis doctor’s warning that if he did he would surely die. “What! am I to beconquered by crabs?” he demanded indignantly of the doctor; for apart fromloving 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,” repliedthe doctor. But my grandfather ordered crabs that very night for supper, andwent in to table with the shining eyes of one who is determined to conquer ordie, and the crabs conquered, and he died. “He was a just man,” said theneighbours, except that nearest neighbour, formerly his best friend, “and mighthave been a great one had he so chosen.” And they buried him with profoundrespect, and the sunshine came into our home life with a burst, and the birdswere not the only creatures that sang, and the arbour, from having been atemple of Delphic utterances, sank into a home for slugs.

Musing on the strangeness of life, and on the invariable ultimate triumph ofthe insignificant and small over the important and vast, illustrated in thisinstance by the easy substitution in the arbour of slugs for grandfathers, Iwent slowly round the next bend of the path, and came to the broad walk alongthe south side of the high wall dividing the flower garden from the kitchengarden, 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 thewall with beauty were gone, and some very neat fruit trees, tidily nailed up atproper intervals, reigned in their stead. Evidently the cousins knew the valueof this warm aspect, for in the border beneath, filled in my father’s time inthis month of November with the wallflowers that were to perfume the walk inspring, there was a thick crop of—I stooped down close to make sure—yes, athick crop of radishes. My eyes filled with tears at the sight of thoseradishes, and it is probably the only occasion on record on which radishes havemade anybody cry. My dear father, whom I so passionately loved, had in his turnpassionately loved this particular border, and spent the spare moments of abusy life enjoying the flowers that grew in it. He had no time himself for amore near acquaintance with the delights of gardening than directing whatplants were to be used, but found rest from his daily work strolling up anddown here, or sitting smoking as close to the flowers as possible. “It is thePurest of Humane pleasures, it is the Greatest Refreshment to the Spirits ofMan,” he would quote (for he read other things besides theKreuzzeitung), looking round with satisfaction on reaching this fragranthaven after a hot day in the fields. Well, the cousins did not think so. Lessfanciful, and more sensible as they probably would have said, their positionplainly was that you cannot eat flowers. Their spirits required no refreshment,but their bodies needed much, and therefore radishes were more precious thanwallflowers. Nor was my youth wholly destitute of radishes, but they were grownin 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 Iwas 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 lonelyit was, after all, in this ghostly garden. The radish bed and what itsymbolised had turned my first joy into grief. This walk and border me too muchof my father reminded, and of all he had been to me. What I knew of good he hadtaught me, and what I had of happiness was through him. Only once during allthe 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, anddemanded one Sunday to be taken to church. My father said no, for I had neverbeen to church, and the German service is long and exhausting. I implored. Heagain said no. I implored again, and showed such a pious disposition, and soearnest a determination to behave well, that he gave in, and we went off veryhappily hand in hand. “Now mind, Elizabeth,” he said, turning to me at thechurch door, “there is no coming out again in the middle. Having insisted onbeing 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 mylegs, 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 donot kneel, and seldom stand, but sit nearly the whole time, praying and singingin great comfort. If you are four years old, however, this unchanged positionsoon becomes one of torture. Unknown and dreadful things go on in your legs,strange prickings and tinglings and dartings up and down, a sudden terrifyingnumbness, when you think they must have dropped off but are afraid to look,then renewed and fiercer prickings, shootings, and burnings. I thought I mustbe very ill, for I had never known my legs like that before. My father sittingbeside 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 organplayed 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 patronof the living, was careful to sing and pray and listen to the sermon withexemplary 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 soalarming that after vainly casting imploring glances at him and seeing that hecontinued 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 voicewithout changing the expression of his face, his lips hardly moving, and hiseyes fixed abstractedly on the ceiling till the organist, who was also thepostman, 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 thatchair, so extraordinary were the sensations in my legs. What could my father doto me if I did cry? With the quick instinct of small children I felt that hecould not put me in the corner in church, nor would he whip me in public, andthat with the whole village looking on, he was helpless, and would have to givein. Therefore I tugged his sleeve again and more peremptorily, and prepared todemand 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 hishand slowly down and gave me a hard pinch—not a playful pinch, but a good hardunmistakeable pinch, such as I had never imagined possible, and then went onserenely to the next hallelujah. For a moment I was petrified withastonishment. Was this my indulgent father, my playmate, adorer, and friend?Smarting with pain, for I was a round baby, with a nicely stretched, tightskin, and dreadfully hurt in my feelings, I opened my mouth to shriek inearnest, when my father’s clear whisper fell on my ear, each word distinct andnot to be misunderstood, his eyes as before gazing meditatively into space, andhis lips hardly moving, “Elizabeth, wenn du schreist, kneife ich dich bis duplatzt.” 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, andafter that I was his.

With a smile and a shiver I turned from the border and its memories to the doorin the wall leading to the kitchen garden, in a corner of which my own littlegarden used to be. The door was open, and I stood still a moment before goingthrough, 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 shutup but for the carefully tended radishes and the recent footmarks on the greenof the path. They were the footmarks of a child. I was stooping down to examinea specially clear one, when the loud caw of a very bored looking crow sittingon 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 ofghosts and cousins were at my heels, nor did I stop till I had reached theremote 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 ofbreath to answer.

This was really a very safe corner. It was separated from the main garden andthe house by the wall, and shut in on the north side by an orchard, and it wasto 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 ofmy most untiring labours. Into the cold earth of this north border on which thesun never shone I had dug my brightest hopes. All my pocket money had beenspent on it, and as bulbs were dear and my weekly allowance small, in a fatalhour I had borrowed from Fräulein Wundermacher, selling her my independence,passing utterly into her power, forced as a result till my next birthday shouldcome round to an unnatural suavity of speech and manner in her company, againstwhich my very soul revolted. And after all, nothing came up. The labour ofdigging and watering, the anxious zeal with which I pounced on weeds, theporing over gardening books, the plans made as I sat on the little seat in themiddle gazing admiringly and with the eye of faith on the trim surface so soonto be gemmed with a thousand flowers, the reckless expenditure ofpfennings, the humiliation of my position in regard to FräuleinWundermacher,—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 forthat sole reason, because he could do nothing with it himself. He was no doubtof opinion that it was quite good enough for a child to experiment upon, andwent his way, when I had thanked him with a profuseness of gratitude I stillremember, with an unmoved countenance. For more than a year I worked andwaited, and watched the career of the flourishing orchard opposite with puzzledfeelings. The orchard was only a few yards away, and yet, although my gardenwas full of manure, and water, and attentions that were never bestowed on theorchard, all it could show and ever did show were a few unhappy beginnings ofgrowth that either remained stationary and did not achieve flowers, or dwindleddown again and vanished. Once I timidly asked the gardener if he could explainthese signs and wonders, but he was a busy man with no time for answeringquestions, and told me shortly that gardening was not learned in a day. Howwell I remember that afternoon, and the very shape of the lazy clouds, and thesmell of spring things, and myself going away abashed and sitting on the shakybench in my domain and wondering for the hundredth time what it was that madethe difference between my bit and the bit of orchard in front of me. The fruittrees, 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 carelesslywell-satisfied fashion that filled my heart with envy. There was a rise in thefield behind them, and at the foot of its protecting slope they luxuriated inthe insolent glory of their white and pink perfection. It was May, and my heartbled at the thought of the tulips I had put in in November, and that I hadnever 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 oftranslucent loveliness, a jewelled ring flung right round the lawn. But whatwas there not on the other side of that wall? Things came up there and grew andflowered 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 ornoticed throve joyously beneath the trees,—daffodils thrusting their spearsthrough the grass, crocuses peeping out inquiringly, snowdrops uncovering theirsmall cold faces when the first shivering spring days came. Only my piece thatI so loved was perpetually ugly and empty. And I sat in it thinking of thesethings on that radiant day, and wept aloud.

Then an apprentice came by, a youth who had often seen me busily digging, andnoticing the unusual tears, and struck perhaps by the difference between mygarden and the profusion of splendour all around, paused with his barrow on thepath in front of me, and remarked that nobody could expect to get blood out ofa 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 haranguedme from the path, explaining the connection between north walls and tulips andblood 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 beenshamefully taken in by the head gardener, who was an unprincipled personthenceforward to be for ever mistrusted and shunned. Standing on the path fromwhich the kindly apprentice had expounded his proverb, this scene rose beforeme as clearly as though it had taken place that very day; but how differenteverything looked, and how it had shrunk! Was this the wide orchard that hadseemed to stretch away, it and the sloping field beyond, up to the gates ofheaven? I believe nearly every child who is much alone goes through a certaintime of hourly expecting the Day of Judgment, and I had made up my mind that onthat Day the heavenly host would enter the world by that very field, comingdown the slope in shining ranks, treading the daffodils under foot, filling theorchard with their songs of exultation, joyously seeking out the sheep fromamong the goats. Of course I was a sheep, and my governess and the headgardener goats, so that the results could not fail to be in every waysatisfactory. But looking up at the slope and remembering my visions, I laughedat 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 bya rockery, and the orchard grass with all its treasures had been dug up, andthe spaces between the trees planted with currant bushes and celery inadmirable rows; so that no future little cousins will be able to dream ofcelestial hosts coming towards them across the fields of daffodils, and willperhaps be the better for being free from visions of the kind, for as I grewolder, uncomfortable doubts laid hold of my heart with cold fingers, dimuncertainties as to the exact ultimate position of the gardener and thegoverness, anxious questionings as to how it would be if it were they whoturned out after all to be sheep, and I who—? For that we all three might begathered into the same fold at the last never, in those days, struck me aspossible, 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 Icontemplated the changes before me, “who could put a rockery among vegetablesand currant bushes? A rockery, of all things in the gardening world, needsconsummate tact in its treatment. It is easier to make mistakes in forming arockery than in any other garden scheme. Either it is a great success, or it isgreat failure; either it is very charming, or it is very absurd. There is nostate between the sublime and the ridiculous possible in a rockery.” I stoodshaking my head disapprovingly at the rockery before me, lost in thesereflections, when a sudden quick pattering of feet coming along in a greathurry made me turn round with a start, just in time to receive the shock of abody 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 eachother in astonishment.

“I thought you were Miss Robinson,” said the little girl, offering no apologyfor having nearly knocked me down. “Who are you?”

“Miss Robinson? Miss Robinson?” I repeated, my eyes fixed on the little girl’sface, and a host of memories stirring within me. “Why, didn’t she marry amissionary, and go out to some place where they ate him?”

The little girl stared harder. “Ate him? Marry? What, has she been married allthis time to somebody who’s been eaten and never let on? Oh, I say, what agame!” 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, andterrified beyond measure by the loudness of her mirth. “Don’t make that horridnoise—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 mouthwith a snap. Her eyes, round and black and shiny like boot buttons, came stillfurther out of her head. “Caught?” she said eagerly. “What, are you afraid ofbeing caught too? Well, this isa game!” And with her hands plunged deepin the pockets of her coat she capered in front of me in the excess of herenjoyment, reminding me of a very fat black lamb frisking round the dazed andpassive sheep its mother.

It was clear that the time had come for me to get down to the gate at the endof the garden as quickly as possible, and I began to move away in thatdirection. The little girl at once stopped capering and planted herselfsquarely in front of me. “Who are you?” she said, examining me from my hat tomy 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 apilgrim,” I said in desperation.

“A pilgrim!” echoed the little girl. She seemed struck, and while she wasstruck I slipped past her and began to walk quickly towards the door in thewall. “A pilgrim!” said the little girl, again, keeping close beside me, andlooking me up and down attentively. “I don’t like pilgrims. Aren’t they peoplewho are always walking about, and have things the matter with their feet? Haveyou 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, leaveme alone—I must run—”

“So must I,” said the little girl, cheerfully, “for Miss Robinson must be closebehind us. She nearly had me just before I found you.” And she started runningby 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 thoughshe panted and turned weird colours, kept by my side and even talked. Oh, I wastired, 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 torun because this very naughty little girl chose to hide instead of going in toher lessons.

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

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

“Oh, I say!” said the little girl, looking at my face, and making the soundknown 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, andwere in the shrubbery. I knew from experience how easy it was to hide in thetangle of little paths, and stopped a moment to look round and listen. Thelittle girl opened her mouth to speak. With great presence of mind I instantlyput my muff in front of it and held it there tight, while I listened. Deadsilence, 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 youwant to say?” I added, eyeing her severely.

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

“A nose like that! A nose like what?” I exclaimed, greatly offended; and thoughI put up my hand and very tenderly and carefully felt it, I could find nodifference in it. “I am afraid poor Miss Robinson must have a wretched life,” Isaid, 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 ithad 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 handkerchiefthat made me young again merely to look at it was produced. I took itthankfully and rubbed with energy, the little girl, intensely interested,watching the operation and giving me advice. “There—it’s all right now—a littlemore 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,” thoughtI, 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 noseshould be, and whatever its colour think it beautiful.” And thrusting thehandkerchief 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 ofa small sheet, and then came running after me. “Where are you going?” she askedsurprised, 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 notallowedmy hand dropped of itself from the latch; and at that instant avoice calling quite close to us through the mist struck me rigid.

“Elizabeth! Elizabeth!” called the voice, “Come in at once to yourlessons—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, “Whoare you?”

“Oh, I’m a ghost!” I cried with conviction, pressing my hands to my foreheadand looking round fearfully.

“Pooh,” said the little girl.

It was the last remark I heard her make, for there was a creaking ofapproaching boots in the bushes, and seized by a frightful panic I pulled thegate open with one desperate pull, flung it to behind me, and fled out and awaydown the wide, misty fields.

The Gotha Almanachsays that the reigning cousin married the daughter ofa Mr. Johnstone, an Englishman, in 1885, and that in 1886 their only child wasborn, Elizabeth.

November20th.—Last night we had ten degrees of frost(Fahrenheit), and I went out the first thing this morning to see what hadbecome of the tea-roses, and behold, they were wide awake and quitecheerful—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 andfull of buds, and one in particular, a Bouquet d’Or, is a mass of buds, andwould flower if it could get the least encouragement. I am beginning to thinkthat the tenderness of tea-roses is much exaggerated, and am certainly veryglad I had the courage to try them in this northern garden. But I must not flytoo boldly in the face of Providence, and have ordered those in the boxes to betaken into the greenhouse for the winter, and hope the Bouquet d’Or, in a sunnyplace near the glass, may be induced to open some of those buds. The greenhouseis only used as a refuge, and kept at a temperature just above freezing, and isreserved entirely for such plants as cannot stand the very coldest part of thewinter out of doors. I don’t use it for growing anything, because I don’t lovethings that will only bear the garden for three or four months in the year andrequire coaxing and petting for the rest of it. Give me a garden full ofstrong, healthy creatures, able to stand roughness and cold without dismallygiving 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 byheat and constant coaxing, but then for each of these there are fifty othersstill lovelier that will gratefully grow in God’s wholesome air and are blessedin return with a far greater intensity of scent and colour.

We have been very busy till now getting the permanent beds into order andplanting the new tea-roses, and I am looking forward to next summer with morehope than ever in spite of my many failures. I wish the years would passquickly that will bring my garden to perfection! The Persian Yellows have goneinto 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 inOctober, each bed having a separate colour. The purple ones are the mostcharming and go well with every rose, but I have white ones with LauretteMessimy, and yellow ones with Safrano, and a new red sort in the big centre bedof red roses. Round the semicircle on the south side of the little privet hedgetwo rows of annual larkspurs in all their delicate shades have been sown, andjust beyond the larkspurs, on the grass, is a semicircle of standard tea andpillar roses.

In front of the house the long borders have been stocked with larkspurs, annualand 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 arethe borders that were so hardly used by the other gardener. The spring boxesfor 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 ofalert cheerfulness and tidy grace, and next to a hyacinth look like awholesome, freshly tubbed young girl beside a stout lady whose every movementweighs down the air with patchouli. Their faint, delicate scent is refinementitself; and is there anything in the world more charming than the sprightly waythey hold up their little faces to the sun? I have heard them called bold andflaunting, but to me they seem modest grace itself, only always on the alert toenjoy life as much as they can and not afraid of looking the sun or anythingelse above them in the face. On the grass there are two beds of them carpetedwith forget-me-nots; and in the grass, in scattered groups, are daffodils andnarcissus. 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 byMadonna lilies, white foxgloves, and columbines.

In a distant glade I have made a spring garden round an oak tree that standsalone in the sun—groups of crocuses, daffodils, narcissus, hyacinths, andtulips, among such flowering shrubs and trees as Pirus Malus spectabilis,floribunda, and coronaria; Prunus Juliana, Mahaleb, serotina, triloba, andPissardi; Cydonias and Weigelias in every colour, and several kinds of Cratægusand other May lovelinesses. If the weather behaves itself nicely, and we getgentle rains in due season, I think this little corner will be beautiful—butwhat a big “if” it is! Drought is our great enemy, and the two last summerseach contained five weeks of blazing, cloudless heat when all the ditches driedup and the soil was like hot pastry. At such times the watering is naturallyquite beyond the strength of two men; but as a garden is a place to be happyin, and not one where you want to meet a dozen curious eyes at every turn, Ishould not like to have more than these two, or rather one and a half—theassistant having stork-like proclivities and going home in the autumn to hisnative Russia, returning in the spring with the first warm winds. I want tokeep him over the winter, as there is much to be done even then, and I soundedhim on the point the other day. He is the most abject-looking of humanbeings—lame, and afflicted with a hideous eye-disease; but he is a good workerand plods along unwearyingly from sunrise to dusk.

“Pray, my good stork,” said I, or German words to that effect, “why don’t youstay here altogether, instead of going home and rioting away all you haveearned?”

“I would stay,” he answered, “but I have my wife there in Russia.”

“Your wife!” I exclaimed, stupidly surprised that the poor deformed creatureshould have found a mate—as though there were not a superfluity of mates in theworld—“I didn’t know you were married?”

“Yes, and I have two little children, and I don’t know what they would do if Iwere not to come home. But it is a very expensive journey to Russia, and costsme 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, supposingI 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 fetchas many as he can early in the year, and they arrive with their bundles, menand women and babies, and as soon as they have got here and had their farespaid, they disappear in the night if they get the chance, sometimes fifty ofthem at a time, to go and work singly or in couples for the peasants, who paythem a pfenningor two more a day than we do, and let them eat with thefamily. From us they get a mark and a half to two marks a day, and as manypotatoes as they can eat. The women get less, not because they work less, butbecause they are women and must not be encouraged. The overseer lives withthem, 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 otherpermanent officials keep guard at night over the houses they are put into. Isuppose they find it sleepy work; for certain it is that spring after springthe same thing happens, fifty of them getting away in spite of all ourprecautions, and we are left with our mouths open and much out of pocket. Thisspring, by some mistake, they arrived without their bundles, which had goneastray on the road, and, as they travel in their best clothes, they refusedutterly to work until their luggage came. Nearly a week was lost waiting, tothe despair of all in authority.

Nor will any persuasions induce them to do anything on Saints’ days, and theresurely 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 beinginterrupted 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 andthe same time—a state of perfection as rare as it is desirable. Reason unaidedby Faith is of course exasperated at this waste of precious time, and I confessthat during the first mild days after the long winter frost when it is possibleto begin to work the ground, I have sympathised with the gloom of the Man ofWrath, confronted in one week by two or three empty days on which no man willlabour, and have listened in silence to his remarks about distant Russiansaints.

I suppose it was my own superfluous amount of civilisation that made me pitythese people when first I came to live among them. They herd together likeanimals and do the work of animals; but in spite of the armed overseer, thedirt 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 surethey would not wear new clothes, and I hear them coming home from their work atdusk singing. They are like little children or animals in their utter inabilityto grasp the idea of a future; and after all, if you work all day in God’ssunshine, when evening comes you are pleasantly tired and ready for rest andnot 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 getless for it; they have to produce offspring, quite regardless of times andseasons and the general fitness of things; they have to do this asexpeditiously as possible, so that they may not unduly interrupt the work inhand; nobody helps them, notices them, or cares about them, least of all thehusband. It is quite a usual thing to see them working in the fields in themorning, and working again in the afternoon, having in the interval produced ababy. The baby is left to an old woman whose duty it is to look after babiescollectively. When I expressed my horror at the poor creatures workingimmediately afterwards as though nothing had happened, the Man of Wrathinformed me that they did not suffer because they had never worn corsets, norhad their mothers and grandmothers. We were riding together at the time, andhad just passed a batch of workers, and my husband was speaking to theoverseer, when a woman arrived alone, and taking up a spade, began to dig. Shegrinned cheerfully at us as she made a curtesy, and the overseer remarked thatshe had just been back to the house and had a baby.

“Poor, poorwoman!” I cried, as we rode on, feeling for some occultreason very angry with the Man of Wrath. “And her wretched husband doesn’t carea rap, and will probably beat her to-night if his supper isn’t right. Whatnonsense it is to talk about the equality of the sexes when the women have thebabies!”

“Quite so, my dear,” replied the Man of Wrath, smiling condescendingly. “Youhave got to the very root of the matter. Nature, while imposing this agreeableduty on the woman, weakens her and disables her for any serious competitionwith man. How can a person who is constantly losing a year of the best part ofher life compete with a young man who never loses any time at all? He has thebrute 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, andthe leaves dropped slowly and silently at our horses’ feet as we rode towardsthe Hirschwald.

“It is a universal custom,” proceeded the Man of Wrath, “amongst theseRussians, and I believe amongst the lower classes everywhere, and certainlycommendable on the score of simplicity, to silence a woman’s objections andaspirations by knocking her down. I have heard it said that this apparentlybrutal action has anything but the maddening effect tenderly nurtured personsmight suppose, and that the patient is soothed and satisfied with a rapidityand completeness unattainable by other and more polite methods. Do yousuppose,” he went on, flicking a twig off a tree with his whip as we passed,“that the intellectual husband, wrestling intellectually with the chaoticyearnings of his intellectual wife, ever achieves the result aimed at? He mayand does go on wrestling till he is tired, but never does he in the very leastconvince her of her folly; while his brother in the ragged coat has got throughthe whole business in less time than it takes me to speak about it. There is nodoubt that these poor women fulfil their vocation far more thoroughly than thewomen in our class, and, as the truest: happiness consists in finding one’svocation quickly and continuing in it all one’s days, I consider they are to beenvied rather than not, since they are early taught, by the impossibility ofargument with marital muscle, the impotence of female endeavour and theblessings of content.”

“Pray go on,” I said politely.

“These women accept their beatings with a simplicity worthy of all praise, andfar from considering themselves insulted, admire the strength and energy of theman who can administer such eloquent rebukes. In Russia, not only mayaman beat his wife, but it is laid down in the catechism and taught all boys atthe time of confirmation as necessary at least once a week, whether she hasdone 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 thesecastigations.

“Pray, my dear man,” I said, pointing with my whip, “look at that baby moon soinnocently peeping at us over the edge of the mist just behind that silverbirch; and don’t talk so much about women and things you don’t understand. Whatis the use of your bothering about fists and whips and muscles and all thedreadful things invented for the confusion of obstreperous wives? You know youare a civilised husband, and a civilised husband is a creature who has ceasedto be a man.”

“And a civilised wife?” he asked, bringing his horse close up beside me andputting 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 andadored 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 anenchanted place on such an evening, when the mists lie low on the turf, andoverhead the delicate, bare branches of the silver birches stand out clearagainst the soft sky, while the little moon looks down kindly on the dampNovember world. Where the trees thicken into a wood, the fragrance of the wetearth and rotting leaves kicked up by the horses’ hoofs fills my soul withdelight. I particularly love that smell,—it brings before me the entirebenevolence of Nature, for ever working death and decay, so piteous inthemselves, into the means of fresh life and glory, and sending up sweet odoursas she works.

December7th.—I have been to England. I went for at least a monthand stayed a week in a fog and was blown home again in a gale. Twice I fledbefore the fogs into the country to see friends with gardens, but it wasraining, and except the beautiful lawns (not to be had in the Fatherland) andthe infinite possibilities, there was nothing to interest the intelligent andgarden-loving foreigner, for the good reason that you cannot be interested ingardens under an umbrella. So I went back to the fogs, and after groping aboutfor a few days more began to long inordinately for Germany. A terrific galesprang up after I had started, and the journey both by sea and land was full ofhorrors, the trains in Germany being heated to such an extent that it is nextto impossible to sit still, great gusts of hot air coming up under thecushions, the cushions themselves being very hot, and the wretched travellerstill hotter.

But when I reached my home and got out of the train into the purest, brightestsnow-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 ahappy row of three beaming babies awaiting me, I was consoled for all mytorments, 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 needlesand grass in the other, and what with the due presentation of the bouquets andthe struggles of the kittens, the hugging and kissing was much interfered with.Kittens, bouquets, and babies were all somehow squeezed into the sleigh, andoff we went with jingling bells and shrieks of delight. “Directly you comeshome the fun begins,” said the May baby, sitting very close to me. “How thesnow purrs!” cried the April baby, as the horses scrunched it up with theirfeet. The June baby sat loudly singing “The King of Love my Shepherd is,” andswinging 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 ranthrough all the rooms, eager to take possession of them again, and feeling asthough I had been away for ever. When I got to the library I came to astandstill,—ah, the dear room, what happy times I have spent in it rummagingamongst 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 thechimney, and the old housekeeper had put pots of flowers about, and on thewriting-table was a great bunch of violets scenting the room. “Oh, howgoodit is to be home again!” I sighed in my satisfaction. The babiesclung about my knees, looking up at me with eyes full of love. Outside thedazzling snow and sunshine, inside the bright room and happy faces—I thought ofthose yellow fogs and shivered. The library is not used by the Man of Wrath; itis neutral ground where we meet in the evenings for an hour before hedisappears into his own rooms—a series of very smoky dens in the southeastcorner of the house. It looks, I am afraid, rather too gay for an ideallibrary; and its colouring, white and yellow, is so cheerful as to be almostfrivolous. There are white bookcases all round the walls, and there is a greatfireplace, and four windows, facing full south, opening on to my most cherishedbit of garden, the bit round the sun-dial; so that with so much colour and sucha big fire and such floods of sunshine it has anything but a sober air, inspite of the venerable volumes filling the shelves. Indeed, I should never besurprised 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 beingsnowed up for any time Providence thinks proper; and to go into the garden inits snowed-up state is like going into a bath of purity. The first breath onopening the door is so ineffably pure that it makes me gasp, and I feel a blackand sinful object in the midst of all the spotlessness. Yesterday I sat out ofdoors near the sun-dial the whole afternoon, with the thermometer so manydegrees below freezing that it will be weeks finding its way up again; butthere was no wind, and beautiful sunshine, and I was well wrapped up in furs. Ieven had tea brought out there, to the astonishment of the menials, and sattill long after the sun had set, enjoying the frosty air. I had to drink thetea very quickly, for it showed a strong inclination to begin to freeze. Afterthe sun had gone down the rooks came home to their nests in the garden with agreat fuss and fluttering, and many hesitations and squabbles before theysettled on their respective trees. They flew over my head in hundreds with amighty swish of wings, and when they had arranged themselves comfortably, anintense hush fell upon the garden, and the house began to look like a Christmascard, with its white roof against the clear, pale green of the western sky, andlamplight shining in the windows.

I had been reading a Life of Luther, lent me by our parson, in the intervalsbetween looking round me and being happy. He came one day with the book andbegged me to read it, having discovered that my interest in Luther was not asliving as it ought to be; so I took it out with me into the garden, because thedullest book takes on a certain saving grace if read out of doors, just asbread and butter, devoid of charm in the drawing-room, is ambrosia eaten undera tree. I read Luther all the afternoon with pauses for refreshing glances atthe garden and the sky, and much thankfulness in my heart. His struggles withdevils amazed me; and I wondered whether such a day as that, full of grace andthe forgiveness of sins, never struck him as something to make him relent eventowards devils. He apparently never allowed himself just to be happy. He was awonderful man, but I am glad I was not his wife.

Our parson is an interesting person, and untiring in his efforts to improvehimself. Both he and his wife study whenever they have a spare moment, andthere is a tradition that she stirs her puddings with one hand and holds aLatin grammar in the other, the grammar, of course, getting the greater shareof her attention. To most German Hausfrausthe dinners and the puddingsare of paramount importance, and they pride themselves on keeping those partsof their houses that are seen in a state of perpetual and spotless perfection,and this is exceedingly praiseworthy; but, I would humbly inquire, are therenot other things even more important? And is not plain living and high thinkingbetter than the other way about? And all too careful making of dinners anddusting of furniture takes a terrible amount of precious time, and—and withshame I confess that my sympathies are all with the pudding and the grammar. Itcannot be right to be the slave of one’s household gods, and I protest that ifmy furniture ever annoyed me by wanting to be dusted when I wanted to be doingsomething else, and there was no one to do the dusting for me, I would cast itall into the nearest bonfire and sit and warm my toes at the flames with greatcontentment, triumphantly selling my dusters to the very next pedlar who wasweak enough to buy them. Parsons’ wives have to do the housework and cookingthemselves, and are thus not only cooks and housemaids, but if they havechildren—and they always do have children—they are head and under nurse aswell; and besides these trifling duties have a good deal to do with their fruitand 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 languagesand keep up with her husband? If I were that husband, those puddings wouldtaste sweetest to me that were served with Latin sauce. They are both severelypious, and are for ever engaged in desperate efforts to practise what theypreach; than which, as we all know, nothing is more difficult. He works in hisparish with the most noble self-devotion, and never loses courage, although hisefforts have been several times rewarded by disgusting libels pasted up on thestreet-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 hasgone 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 theywere under his predecessor, a man who smoked and drank beer from Monday morningto Saturday night, never did a stroke of work, and often kept the scantycongregation waiting on Sunday afternoons while he finished his postprandialnap. It is discouraging enough to make most men give in, and leave the parishto get to heaven or not as it pleases; but he never seems discouraged, and goeson sacrificing the best part of his life to these people when all his tastesare literary, and all his inclinations towards the life of the student. Hisconvictions drag him out of his little home at all hours to minister to thesick and exhort the wicked; they give him no rest, and never let him feel hehas done enough; and when he comes home weary, after a day’s wrestling with hisparishioners’ souls, he is confronted on his doorstep by filthy abuse pasted upon his own front door. He never speaks of these things, but how shall they behid? Everybody here knows everything that happens before the day is over, andwhat we have for dinner is of far greater general interest than the mostastounding political earthquake. They have a pretty, roomy cottage, and a goodbit of ground adjoining the churchyard. His predecessor used to hang out hiswashing on the tombstones to dry, but then he was a person entirely lost to allsense of decency, and had finally to be removed, preaching a farewell sermon ofa most vituperative description, and hurling invective at the Man of Wrath, whosat up in his box drinking in every word and enjoying himself thoroughly. TheMan of Wrath likes novelty, and such a sermon had never been heard before. Itis spoken of in the village to this day with bated breath and awful joy.

December22nd.—Up to now we have had a beautiful winter. Clearskies, frost, little wind, and, except for a sharp touch now and then, very fewreally 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 springwhen it seems wanting in youth and chastity next to that of other flowers, I amglad enough now to bury my nose in their heavy sweetness. In December onecannot afford to be fastidious; besides, one is actually less fastidious abouteverything in the winter. The keen air braces soul as well as body intorobustness, and the food and the perfume disliked in the summer are perfectlywelcome then.

I am very busy preparing for Christmas, but have often locked myself up in aroom alone, shutting out my unfinished duties, to study the flower cataloguesand make my lists of seeds and shrubs and trees for the spring. It is afascinating occupation, and acquires an additional charm when you know youought to be doing something else, that Christmas is at the door, that childrenand servants and farm hands depend on you for their pleasure, and that, if youdon’t see to the decoration of the trees and house, and the buying of thepresents, nobody else will. The hours fly by shut up with those catalogues andwith Duty snarling on the other side of the door. I don’t like Duty—everythingin the least disagreeable is always sure to be one’s duty. Why cannot it be myduty to make lists and plans for the dear garden? “And so it is,” Iinsisted to the Man of Wrath, when he protested against what he called wastingmy 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 thecombination of both is as rare as it is useful. Indeed, in its practicalutility the only thing I ever saw to equal it is a sofa my neighbour has boughtas a Christmas surprise for her husband, and which she showed me the last timeI called there—a beautiful invention, as she explained, combining a bedstead, asofa, and a chest of drawers, and into which you put your clothes, and on topof which you put yourself, and if anybody calls in the middle of the night andyou happen to be using the drawing-room as a bedroom, you just pop thebedclothes inside, and there you are discovered sitting on your sofa andlooking 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 allyellow, every shade of yellow from fieriest orange to nearly white, and theamount of work and studying of gardening books it costs me will only beappreciated by beginners like myself. I have been weeks planning it, and it isnot nearly finished. I want it to be a succession of glories from May till thefrosts, and the chief feature is to be the number of “ardent marigolds”—flowersthat I very tenderly love—and nasturtiums. The nasturtiums are to be of everysort and shade, and are to climb and creep and grow in bushes, and show theirlovely flowers and leaves to the best advantage. Then there are to beeschscholtzias, dahlias, sunflowers, zinnias, scabiosa, portulaca, yellowviolas, yellow stocks, yellow sweet-peas, yellow lupins—everything that isyellow 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 andpines, and facing southeast. You go through a little pine wood, and, turning acorner, are to come suddenly upon this bit of captured morning glory. I want itto 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 probabledifference between the idea and its realisation. I am ignorant, and thegardener is, I do believe, still more so; for he was forcing some tulips, andthey 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 afterChristmas, and refuses to enter into any of my plans with the enthusiasm theydeserve, but sits with vacant eye dreamily chopping wood from morning tillnight to keep the beloved one’s kitchen fire well supplied. I cannot understandany one preferring cooks to marigolds; those future marigolds, shadowy as theyare, and whose seeds are still sleeping at the seedsman’s, have shone throughmy winter days like golden lamps.

I wish with all my heart I were a man, for of course the first thing I shoulddo would be to buy a spade and go and garden, and then I should have thedelight of doing everything for my flowers with my own hands and need not wastetime explaining what I want done to somebody else. It is dull work givingorders and trying to describe the bright visions of one’s brain to a person whohas no visions and no brain, and who thinks a yellow bed should be calceolariasedged with blue.

I have taken care in choosing my yellow plants to put down only those humbleones that are easily pleased and grateful for little, for my soil is by nomeans all that it might be, and to most plants the climate is rather trying. Ifeel really grateful to any flower that is sturdy and willing enough toflourish here. Pansies seem to like the place and so do sweet-peas; pinksdon’t, and after much coaxing gave hardly any flowers last summer. Nearly allthe 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 anddied, and three standard Dr. Grills which stood in a row and simply sulked. Ihad been very excited about Dr. Grill, his description in the catalogues beingspecially fascinating, and no doubt I deserved the snubbing I got. “Never beexcited, my dears, about anything,” shall be the advice I will give thethree 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 smoulderingones. Don’t look pleased, don’t look interested, don’t, above all things, lookeager. 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 arepleased to see a person the less is he pleased to see you; whereas, if you aredisagreeable, he will grow pleasant visibly, his countenance expanding intowider amiability the more your own is stiff and sour. But I was not preparedfor that sort of thing in a rose, and was disgusted with Dr. Grill. He had thebest place in the garden—warm, sunny, and sheltered; his holes were preparedwith the tenderest care; he was given the most dainty mixture of compost, clay,and manure; he was watered assiduously all through the drought when morewilling flowers got nothing; and he refused to do anything but look black andshrivel. He did not die, but neither did he live—he just existed; and at theend of the summer not one of him had a scrap more shoot or leaf than when hewas first put in in April. It would have been better if he had died straightaway, for then I should have known what to do; as it is, there he is stilloccupying the best place, wrapped up carefully for the winter, excluding kinderroses, and probably intending to repeat the same conduct next year. Well,trials are the portion of mankind, and gardeners have their share, and in anycase it is better to be tried by plants than persons, seeing that with plantsyou know that it is you who are in the wrong, and with persons it is always theother way about—and who is there among us who has not felt the pangs of injuredinnocence, and known them to be grievous?

I have two visitors staying with me, though I have done nothing to provoke suchan infliction, and had been looking forward to a happy little Christmas alonewith 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’tknow why it should, but it does. I had not even invited these good ladies—likegreatness on the modest, they were thrust upon me. One is Irais, the sweetsinger of the summer, whom I love as she deserves, but of whom I certainlythought I had seen the last for at least a year, when she wrote and asked if Iwould have her over Christmas, as her husband was out of sorts, and she didn’tlike 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 herexistence a fortnight ago. Then coming down cheerfully one morning tobreakfast—it was the very day after my return from England—I found a letterfrom an English friend, who up till then had been perfectly innocuous, askingme to befriend Minora. I read the letter aloud for the benefit of the Man ofWrath, who was eating Spickgans, a delicacy much sought after in theseparts. “Do, my dear Elizabeth,” wrote my friend, “take some notice of the poorthing. She is studying art in Dresden, and has nowhere literally to go forChristmas. She is very ambitious and hardworking—”

“Then,” interrupted the Man of Wrath, “she is not pretty. Only ugly girls workhard.”

“—and she is really very clever—”

“I do not like clever girls, they are so stupid,” again interrupted the Man ofWrath.

“—and unless some kind creature like yourself takes pity on her she will bevery lonely.”

“Then let her be lonely.”

“Her mother is my oldest friend, and would be greatly distressed to think thather 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 shouldbe inclined,” the letter went on, “to play the goodSamaritan, 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 alarminglyzealous type attached to her person for the last six weeks, looked up from herbread and milk.

“It sounds like islands,” she remarked pensively.

The governess coughed.

“Majora, Minora, Alderney, and Sark,” explained her pupil.

I looked at her severely.

“If you are not careful, April,” I said, “you’ll be a genius when you grow upand disgrace your parents.”

Miss Jones looked as though she did not like Germans. I am afraid she despisesus because she thinks we are foreigners—an attitude of mind quite British andwholly to her credit; but we, on the other hand, regard heras aforeigner, which, of course, makes things complicated.

“Shall I really have to have this strange girl?” I asked, addressing nobody inparticular and not expecting a reply.

“You need not have her,” said the Man of Wrath composedly, “but you will. Youwill write to-day and cordially invite her, and when she has been heretwenty-four hours you will quarrel with her. I know you, my dear.”

“Quarrel! I? With a little art-student?”

Miss Jones cast down her eyes. She is perpetually scenting a scene, and isalways ready to bring whole batteries of discretion and tact and good taste tobear on us, and seems to know we are disputing in an unseemly manner when wewould never dream it ourselves but for the warning of her downcast eyes. Iwould take my courage in both hands and ask her to go, for besides thissuperfluity of discreet behaviour she is, although only nursery, much toozealous, and inclined to be always teaching and never playing; but,unfortunately, the April baby adores her and is sure there never was any one sobeautiful before. She comes every day with fresh accounts of the splendours ofher wardrobe, and feeling descriptions of her umbrellas and hats; and MissJones looks offended and purses up her lips. In common with most governesses,she has a little dark down on her upper lip, and the April baby appeared oneday at dinner with her own decorated in faithful imitation, having achieved itafter much struggling, with the aid of a lead pencil and unbounded love. MissJones put her in the corner for impertinence. I wonder why governesses are sounpleasant. The Man of Wrath says it is because they are not married. Withoutventuring to differ entirely from the opinion of experience, I would add thatthe strain of continually having to set an example must surely be very great.It is much easier, and often more pleasant, to be a warning than an example,and governesses are but women, and women are sometimes foolish, and when youwant to be foolish it must be annoying to have to be wise.

Minora and Irais arrived yesterday together; or rather, when the carriage droveup, Irais got out of it alone, and informed me that there was a strange girl ona bicycle a little way behind. I sent back the carriage to pick her up, for itwas dusk and the roads are terrible.

“But why do you have strange girls here at all?” asked Irais rather peevishly,taking off her hat in the library before the fire, and otherwise making herselfvery much at home; “I don’t like them. I’m not sure that they’re not worse thanhusbands who are out of order. Who is she? She would bicycle from the station,and is, I am sure, the first woman who has done it. The little boys threwstones at her.”

“Oh, my dear, that only shows the ignorance of the little boys. Never mind her.Let us have tea in peace before she comes.”

“But we should be much happier without her,” she grumbled. “Weren’t we happyenough in the summer, Elizabeth—just you and I?”

“Yes, indeed we were,” I answered heartily, putting my arms round her. Theflame of my affection for Irais burns very brightly on the day of her arrival;besides, this time I have prudently provided against her sinning with thesalt-cellars by ordering them to be handed round like vegetable dishes. We hadfinished tea and she had gone up to her room to dress before Minora and herbicycle were got here. I hurried out to meet her, feeling sorry for her,plunged into a circle of strangers at such a very personal season as Christmas.But she was not very shy; indeed, she was less shy than I was, and lingered inthe hall, giving the servants directions to wipe the snow off the tyres of hermachine before she lent an attentive ear to my welcoming remarks.

“I couldn’t make your man understand me at the station,” she said at last, whenher mind was at rest about her bicycle; “I asked him how far it was, and whatthe roads were like, and he only smiled. Is he German? But of course he is—howodd that he didn’t understand. You speak English very well,—very well indeed,do you know.” By this time we were in the library, and she stood on thehearth-rug warming her back while I poured her out some tea.

“What a quaint room,” she remarked, looking round, “and the hall is so curioustoo. Very old, isn’t it? There’s a lot of copy here.”

The Man of Wrath, who had been in the hall on her arrival and had come in withus, began to look about on the carpet. “Copy?” he inquired, “Where’s copy?”

“Oh—material, you know, for a book. I’m just jotting down what strikes me inyour country, and when I have time shall throw it into book form.” She spokevery loud, as English people always do to foreigners.

“My dear,” I said breathlessly to Irais, when I had got into her room and shutthe door and Minora was safely in hers, “what do you think—she writes books!”

“What—the bicycling girl?”

“Yes—Minora—imagine it!”

We stood and looked at each other with awestruck faces.

“How dreadful!” murmured Irais. “I never met a young girl who did that before.”

“She says this place is full of copy.”

“Full of what?”

“That’s what you make books with.”

“Oh, my dear, this is worse than I expected! A strange girl is always a boreamong good friends, but one can generally manage her. But a girl who writesbooks—why, it isn’t respectable! And you can’t snub that sort of people;they’re unsnubbable.”

“Oh, but we’ll try!” I cried, with such heartiness that we both laughed.

The hall and the library struck Minora most; indeed, she lingered so long afterdinner in the hall, which is cold, that the Man of Wrath put on his fur coat byway of a gentle hint. His hints are always gentle.

She wanted to hear the whole story about the chapel and the nuns and GustavusAdolphus, and pulling out a fat note-book began to take down what I said. I atonce relapsed into silence.

“Well?” she said.

“That’s all.”

“Oh, but you’ve only just begun.”

“It doesn’t go any further. Won’t you come into the library?”

In the library she again took up her stand before the fire and warmed herself,and we sat in a row and were cold. She has a wonderfully good profile, which isirritating. The wind, however, is tempered to the shorn lamb by her eyes beingset too closely together.

Irais lit a cigarette, and leaning back in her chair, contemplated hercritically beneath her long eyelashes. “You are writing a book?” she askedpresently.

“Well—yes, I suppose I may say that I am. Just my impressions, you know, ofyour country. Anything that strikes me as curious or amusing—I jot it down, andwhen I have time shall work it up into something, I daresay.”

“Are you not studying painting?”

“Yes, but I can’t study that for ever. We have an English proverb: ‘Life isshort and Art is long’—too long, I sometimes think—and writing is a greatrelaxation when I am tired.”

“What shall you call it?”

“Oh, I thought of calling it Journeyings in Germany. It sounds well, andwould be correct. Or Jottings from German Journeyings,—I haven’t quitedecided yet which.”

“By the author of Prowls in Pomerania, you might add,” suggested Irais.

“And Drivel from Dresden,” said I.

“And Bosh from Berlin,” added Irais.

Minora stared. “I don’t think those two last ones would do,” she said, “becauseit is not to be a facetious book. But your first one is rather a good title,”she added, looking at Irais and drawing out her note-book. “I think I’ll justjot that down.”

“If you jot down all we say and then publish it, will it still be your book?”asked Irais.

But Minora was so busy scribbling that she did not hear.

“And have youno suggestions to make, Sage?” asked Irais, turning to theMan of Wrath, who was blowing out clouds of smoke in silence.

“Oh, do you call him Sage?” cried Minora; “and always in English?”

Irais and I looked at each other. We knew what we did call him, and were afraidMinora would in time ferret it out and enter it in her note-book. The Man ofWrath looked none too well pleased to be alluded to under his very nose by ournew guest as “him.”

“Husbands are always sages,” said I gravely.

“Though sages are not always husbands,” said Irais with equal gravity. “Sagesand husbands—sage and husbands—” she went on musingly, “what does that remindyou of, Miss Minora?”

“Oh, I know,—how stupid of me!” cried Minora eagerly, her pencil in mid-air andher brain clutching at the elusive recollection, “sage and,—why,—yes,—no,—yes,of course—oh,” disappointedly, “but that’s vulgar—I can’t put it in.”

“What is vulgar?” I asked.

“She thinks sage and onions is vulgar,” said Irais languidly; “but it isn’t, itis very good.” She got up and walked to the piano, and, sitting down, began,after a little wandering over the keys, to sing.

“Do you play?” I asked Minora.

“Yes, but I am afraid I am rather out of practice.”

I said no more. I know what thatsort of playing is.

When we were lighting our bedroom candles Minora began suddenly to speak in anunknown tongue. We stared. “What is the matter with her?” murmured Irais.

“I thought, perhaps,” said Minora in English, “you might prefer to talk German,and as it is all the same to me what I talk—”

“Oh, pray don’t trouble,” said Irais. “We like airing our English—don’t we,Elizabeth?”

“I don’t want my German to get rusty though,” said Minora; “I shouldn’t like toforget it.”

“Oh, but isn’t there an English song,” said Irais, twisting round her neck asshe preceded us upstairs, “‘’Tis folly to remember, ’tis wisdom to forget’?”

“You are not nervous sleeping alone, I hope,” I said hastily.

“What room is she in?” asked Irais.

“No. 12.”

“Oh!—do you believe in ghosts?”

Minora turned pale.

“What nonsense,” said I; “we have no ghosts here. Good-night. If you wantanything, mind you ring.”

“And if you see anything curious in that room,” called Irais from her bedroomdoor, “mind you jot it down.”

December27th—It is the fashion, I believe, to regard Christmasas a bore of rather a gross description, and as a time when you are invited toover-eat yourself, and pretend to be merry without just cause. As a matter offact, it is one of the prettiest and most poetic institutions possible, ifobserved in the proper manner, and after having been more or less unpleasant toeverybody for a whole year, it is a blessing to be forced on that one day to beamiable, and it is certainly delightful to be able to give presents withoutbeing haunted by the conviction that you are spoiling the recipient, and willsuffer for it afterward. Servants are only big children, and are made just ashappy as children by little presents and nice things to eat, and, for daysbeforehand, every time the three babies go into the garden they expect to meetthe Christ Child with His arms full of gifts. They firmly believe that it isthus their presents are brought, and it is such a charming idea that Christmaswould be worth celebrating for its sake alone.

As great secrecy is observed, the preparations devolve entirely on me, and itis not very easy work, with so many people in our own house and on each of thefarms, and all the children, big and little, expecting their share ofhappiness. The library is uninhabitable for several days before and after, asit is there that we have the trees and presents. All down one side are thetrees, and the other three sides are lined with tables, a separate one for eachperson in the house. When the trees are lighted, and stand in their radianceshining down on the happy faces, I forget all the trouble it has been, and thenumber of times I have had to run up and down stairs, and the various aches inhead and feet, and enjoy myself as much as anybody. First the June baby isushered in, then the others and ourselves according to age, then the servants,then come the head inspector and his family, the other inspectors from thedifferent farms, the mamsells, the bookkeepers and secretaries, and then allthe children, troops and troops of them—the big ones leading the little ones bythe hand and carrying the babies in their arms, and the mothers peeping roundthe door. As many as can get in stand in front of the trees, and sing two orthree carols; then they are given their presents, and go off triumphantly,making room for the next batch. My three babies sang lustily too, whether theyhappened to know what was being sung or not. They had on white dresses inhonour of the occasion, and the June baby was even arrayed in a low-necked andshort-sleeved garment, after the manner of Teutonic infants, whatever the stateof the thermometer. Her arms are like miniature prize-fighter’s arms—I neversaw such things; they are the pride and joy of her little nurse, who had tiedthem up with blue ribbons, and kept on kissing them. I shall certainly not beable to take her to balls when she grows up, if she goes on having arms likethat.

When they came to say good-night, they were all very pale and subdued. TheApril baby had an exhausted-looking Japanese doll with her, which she said shewas taking to bed, not because she liked him, but because she was so sorry forhim, he seemed so very tired. They kissed me absently, and went away, only theApril baby glancing at the trees as she passed and making them a curtesy.

“Good-bye, trees,” I heard her say; and then she made the Japanese doll bow tothem, which he did, in a very languid and blasé fashion. “You’llneversee such trees again,” she told him, giving him a vindictive shake, “for you’llbe brokened longbefore next time.”

She went out, but came back as though she had forgotten something.

“Thank the Christkindso much, Mummy, won’t you, for all thelovely things He brought us. I suppose you’re writing to Him now, isn’t you?”

I cannot see that there was anything gross about our Christmas, and we wereperfectly merry without any need to pretend, and for at least two days itbrought us a little nearer together, and made us kind. Happiness is sowholesome; it invigorates and warms me into piety far more effectually than anyamount of trials and griefs, and an unexpected pleasure is the surest means ofbringing me to my knees. In spite of the protestations of some peculiarlyconstructed persons that they are the better for trials, I don’t believe it.Such things must sour us, just as happiness must sweeten us, and make uskinder, and more gentle. And will anybody affirm that it behoves us to be morethankful for trials than for blessings? We were meant to be happy, and toaccept all the happiness offered with thankfulness—indeed, we are none of usever thankful enough, and yet we each get so much, so very much, more than wedeserve. I know a woman—she stayed with me last summer—who rejoices grimly whenthose she loves suffer. She believes that it is our lot, and that it braces usand does us good, and she would shield no one from even unnecessary pain; sheweeps with the sufferer, but is convinced it is all for the best. Well, let hercontinue in her dreary beliefs; she has no garden to teach her the beauty andthe happiness of holiness, nor does she in the least desire to possess one; herconvictions have the sad gray colouring of the dingy streets and houses shelives amongst—the sad colour of humanity in masses. Submission to what peoplecall their “lot” is simply ignoble. If your lot makes you cry and be wretched,get rid of it and take another; strike out for yourself; don’t listen to theshrieks of your relations, to their gibes or their entreaties; don’t let yourown microscopic set prescribe your goings-out and comings-in; don’t be afraidof public opinion in the shape of the neighbour in the next house, when all theworld is before you new and shining, and everything is possible, if you willonly be energetic and independent and seize opportunity by the scruff of theneck.

“To hear you talk,” said Irais, “no one would ever imagine that you dream awayyour days in a garden with a book, and that you never in your life seizedanything by the scruff of its neck. And what is scruff? I hope I have not gotany on me.” And she craned her neck before the glass.

She and Minora were going to help me decorate the trees, but very soon Iraiswandered off to the piano, and Minora was tired and took up a book; so I calledin Miss Jones and the babies—it was Miss Jones’s last public appearance, as Ishall relate—and after working for the best part of two days they werefinished, and looked like lovely ladies in widespreading, sparkling petticoats,holding up their skirts with glittering fingers. Minora wrote a longdescription of them for a chapter of her book which is headed Noel,—Isaw that much, because she left it open on the table while she went to talk toMiss Jones. They were fast friends from the very first, and though it is saidto be natural to take to one’s own countrymen, I am unable altogether tosympathise with such a reason for sudden affection.

“I wonder what they talk about?” I said to Irais yesterday, when there was nogetting Minora to come to tea, so deeply was she engaged in conversation withMiss Jones.

“Oh, my dear, how can I tell? Lovers, I suppose, or else they think they areclever, and then they talk rubbish.”

“Well, of course, Minora thinks she is clever.”

“I suppose she does. What does it matter what she thinks? Why does yourgoverness look so gloomy? When I see her at luncheon I always imagine she musthave just heard that somebody is dead. But she can’t hear that every day. Whatis the matter with her?”

“I don’t think she feels quite as proper as she looks,” I said doubtfully; Iwas for ever trying to account for Miss Jones’s expression.

“But that must be rather nice,” said Irais. “It would be awful for her if shefelt exactly the same as she looks.”

At that moment the door leading into the schoolroom opened softly, and theApril baby, tired of playing, came in and sat down at my feet, leaving the dooropen; and this is what we heard Miss Jones saying—

“Parents are seldom wise, and the strain the conscientious place uponthemselves to appear so before their children and governess must be terrible.Nor are clergymen more pious than other men, yet they have continually to posebefore their flock as such. As for governesses, Miss Minora, I know what I amsaying when I affirm that there is nothing more intolerable than to have to bepolite, and even humble, to persons whose weaknesses and follies are glaringlyapparent in every word they utter, and to be forced by the presence of childrenand employers to a dignity of manner in no way corresponding to one’s feelings.The grave father of a family, who was probably one of the least respectable ofbachelors, is an interesting study at his own table, where he is constrained toassume airs of infallibility merely because his children are looking at him.The fact of his being a parent does not endow him with any supreme and suddenvirtue; and I can assure you that among the eyes fixed upon him, not the leastcritical and amused are those of the humble person who fills the post ofgoverness.”

“Oh, Miss Jones, how lovely!” we heard Minora say in accents of rapture, whilewe sat transfixed with horror at these sentiments. “Do you mind if I put thatdown in my book? You say it all so beautifully.”

“Without a few hours of relaxation,” continued Miss Jones, “of privateindemnification for the toilsome virtues displayed in public, who could wadethrough days of correct behaviour? There would be no reaction, no room forbetter impulses, no place for repentance. Parents, priests, and governesseswould be in the situation of a stout lady who never has a quiet moment in whichshe can take off her corsets.”

“My dear, what a firebrand!” whispered Irais. I got up and went in. They weresitting on the sofa, Minora with clasped hands, gazing admiringly into MissJones’s face, which wore a very different expression from the one of sour andunwilling propriety I have been used to seeing.

“May I ask you to come to tea?” I said to Minora. “And I should like to havethe children a little while.”

She got up very reluctantly, but I waited with the door open until she had gonein and the two babies had followed. They had been playing at stuffing eachother’s ears with pieces of newspaper while Miss Jones provided Minora withnoble thoughts for her work, and had to be tortured afterward with tweezers. Isaid nothing to Minora, but kept her with us till dinner-time, and this morningwe went for a long sleigh-drive. When we came in to lunch there was no MissJones.

“Is Miss Jones ill?” asked Minora.

“She is gone,” I said.

“Gone?”

“Did you never hear of such things as sick mothers?” asked Irais blandly; andwe talked resolutely of something else.

All the afternoon Minora has moped. She had found a kindred spirit, and it hasbeen ruthlessly torn from her arms as kindred spirits so often are. It isenough to make her mope, and it is not her fault, poor thing, that she shouldhave preferred the society of a Miss Jones to that of Irais and myself.

At dinner Irais surveyed her with her head on one side. “You look so pale,” shesaid; “are you not well?”

Minora raised her eyes heavily, with the patient air of one who likes to bethought a sufferer. “I have a slight headache,” she replied gently.

“I hope you are not going to be ill,” said Irais with great concern, “becausethere is only a cow-doctor to be had here, and though he means well, I believehe is rather rough.” Minora was plainly startled. “But what do you do if youare ill?” she asked.

“Oh, we are never ill,” said I; “the very knowledge that there would be no oneto cure us seems to keep us healthy.”

“And if any one takes to her bed,” said Irais, “Elizabeth always calls in thecow-doctor.”

Minora was silent. She feels, I am sure, that she has got into a part of theworld peopled solely by barbarians, and that the only civilised creaturebesides herself has departed and left her at our mercy. Whatever herreflections may be her symptoms are visibly abating.

January1st.—The service on New Year’s Eve is the only one in thewhole year that in the least impresses me in our little church, and then thevery bareness and ugliness of the place and the ceremonial produce an effectthat a snug service in a well-lit church never would. Last night we took Iraisand Minora, and drove the three lonely miles in a sleigh. It was pitch-dark,and blowing great guns. We sat wrapped up to our eyes in furs, and as mute as afuneral procession.

“We are going to the burial of our last year’s sins,” said Irais, as westarted; and there certainly was a funereal sort of feeling in the air. Up inour gallery pew we tried to decipher our chorales by the light of thespluttering tallow candles stuck in holes in the woodwork, the flames wildlyblown about by the draughts. The wind banged against the windows in greatgusts, screaming louder than the organ, and threatening to blow out theagitated lights together. The parson in his gloomy pulpit, surrounded by aframework of dusty carved angels, took on an awful appearance of menacingAuthority as he raised his voice to make himself heard above the clatter.Sitting there in the dark, I felt very small, and solitary, and defenceless,alone in a great, big, black world. The church was as cold as a tomb; some ofthe candles guttered and went out; the parson in his black robe spoke of deathand judgment; I thought I heard a child’s voice screaming, and could hardlybelieve it was only the wind, and felt uneasy and full of forebodings; all myfaith and philosophy deserted me, and I had a horrid feeling that I shouldprobably be well punished, though for what I had no precise idea. If it had notbeen so dark, and if the wind had not howled so despairingly, I should havepaid little attention to the threats issuing from the pulpit; but, as it was, Ifell to making good resolutions. This is always a bad sign,—only those whobreak them make them; and if you simply do as a matter of course that which isright as it comes, any preparatory resolving to do so becomes completelysuperfluous. I have for some years past left off making them on New Year’s Eve,and only the gale happening as it did reduced me to doing so last night; for Ihave long since discovered that, though the year and the resolutions may benew, I myself am not, and it is worse than useless putting new wine into oldbottles.

“But I am not an old bottle,” said Irais indignantly, when I held forth to herto the above effect a few hours later in the library, restored to all myphilosophy by the warmth and light, “and I find my resolutions carry me verynicely into the spring. I revise them at the end of each month, and strike outthe unnecessary ones. By the end of April they have been so severely revisedthat there are none left.”

“There, you see I am right; if you were not an old bottle your new contentswould gradually arrange themselves amiably as a part of you, and the practiceof your resolutions would lose its bitterness by becoming a habit.”

She shook her head. “Such things never lose their bitterness,” she said, “andthat is why I don’t let them cling to me right into the summer. When May comes,I give myself up to jollity with all the rest of the world, and am too busybeing happy to bother about anything I may have resolved when the days werecold and dark.”

“And that is just why I love you,” I thought. She often says what I feel.

“I wonder,” she went on after a pause, “whether men ever make resolutions?”

“I don’t think they do. Only women indulge in such luxuries. It is a nice sortof feeling, when you have nothing else to do, giving way to endless grief andpenitence, and steeping yourself to the eyes in contrition; but it is silly.Why cry over things that are done? Why do naughty things at all, if you aregoing to repent afterward? Nobody is naughty unless they like being naughty;and nobody ever really repents unless they are afraid they are going to befound out.”

“By ‘nobody’ of course you mean women,” said Irais.

“Naturally; the terms are synonymous. Besides, men generally have the courageof their opinions.”

“I hope you are listening, Miss Minora,” said Irais in the amiably polite toneshe assumes whenever she speaks to that young person.

It was getting on towards midnight, and we were sitting round the fire, waitingfor the New Year, and sipping Glühwein, prepared at a small table by theMan of Wrath. It was hot, and sweet, and rather nasty, but it is proper todrink it on this one night, so of course we did.

Minora does not like either Irais or myself. We very soon discovered that, andlaugh about it when we are alone together. I can understand her dislikingIrais, but she must be a perverse creature not to like me. Irais has poked funat her, and I have been, I hope, very kind; yet we are bracketed together inher black books. It is also apparent that she looks upon the Man of Wrath as aninteresting example of an ill-used and misunderstood husband, and she isdisposed to take him under her wing, and defend him on all occasions againstus. He never speaks to her; he is at all times a man of few words, but, as faras Minora is concerned, he might have no tongue at all, and sits sphinx-likeand impenetrable while she takes us to task about some remark of a profanenature that we may have addressed to him. One night, some days after herarrival, she developed a skittishness of manner which has since disappeared,and tried to be playful with him; but you might as well try to be playful witha graven image. The wife of one of the servants had just produced a boy, thefirst after a series of five daughters, and at dinner we drank the health ofall parties concerned, the Man of Wrath making the happy father drink a glassoff at one gulp, his heels well together in military fashion. Minora thoughtthe incident typical of German manners, and not only made notes about it, butjoined heartily in the health-drinking, and afterward grew skittish.

She proposed, first of all, to teach us a dance called, I think, the WashingtonPost, and which was, she said, much danced in England; and, to induce us tolearn, she played the tune to us on the piano. We remained untouched by itsbeauties, each buried in an easy-chair toasting our toes at the fire. Amongstthose toes were those of the Man of Wrath, who sat peaceably reading a book andsmoking. Minora volunteered to show us the steps, and as we still did not move,danced solitary behind our chairs. Irais did not even turn her head to look,and I was the only one amiable or polite enough to do so. Do I deserve to beplaced in Minora’s list of disagreeable people side by side with Irais?Certainly not. Yet I most surely am.

“It wants the music, of course,” observed Minora breathlessly, darting in andout between the chairs, apparently addressing me, but glancing at the Man ofWrath.

No answer from anybody.

“It is sucha pretty dance,” she panted again, after a few moregyrations.

No answer.

“And is all the rage at home.”

No answer.

“Do let me teach you. Won’t youtry, Herr Sage?”

She went up to him and dropped him a little curtesy. It is thus she alwaysaddresses him, entirely oblivious to the fact, so patent to every one else,that he resents it.

“Oh come, put away that tiresome old book,” she went on gaily, as he did notmove; “I am certain it is only some dry agricultural work that you just nodover. Dancing is much better for you.” Irais and I looked at one another quitefrightened. I am sure we both turned pale when the unhappy girl actually laidhold forcibly of his book, and, with a playful little shriek, ran away with itinto the next room, hugging it to her bosom and looking back roguishly over hershoulder at him as she ran. There was an awful pause. We hardly dared raise oureyes. Then the Man of Wrath got up slowly, knocked the ashes off the end ofhis cigar, looked at his watch, and went out at the opposite door into his ownrooms, where he stayed for the rest of the evening. She has never, I must say,been skittish since.

“I hope you are listening, Miss Minora,” said Irais, “because this sort ofconversation is likely to do you good.”

“I always listen when people talk sensibly,” replied Minora, stirring her grog.

Irais glanced at her with slightly doubtful eyebrows. “Do you agree with ourhostess’s description of women?” she asked after a pause.

“As nobodies? No, of course I do not.”

“Yet she is right. In the eye of the law we are literally nobodies in ourcountry. Did you know that women are forbidden to go to political meetingshere?”

“Really?” Out came the note-book.

“The law expressly forbids the attendance at such meetings of women, children,and idiots.”

“Children and idiots—I understand that,” said Minora; “but women—and classedwith children and idiots?”

“Classed with children and idiots,” repeated Irais, gravely nodding her head.“Did you know that the law forbids females of any age to ride on the top ofomnibuses or tramcars?”

“Not really?”

“Do you know why?”

“I can’t imagine.”

“Because in going up and down the stairs those inside might perhaps catch aglimpse of the stocking covering their ankles.”

“But what—”

“Did you know that the morals of the German public are in such a shakycondition that a glimpse of that sort would be fatal to them?”

“But I don’t see how a stocking—”

“With stripes round it,” said Irais.

“And darns in it,” I added.

“—could possibly be pernicious?”

“‘The Pernicious Stocking; or, Thoughts on the Ethics of Petticoats,’” saidIrais. “Put that down as the name of your next book on Germany.”

“I never know,” complained Minora, letting her note-book fall, “whether you arein earnest or not.”

“Don’t you?” said Irais sweetly.

“Is it true,” appealed Minora to the Man of Wrath, busy with his lemons in thebackground, “that your law classes women with children and idiots?”

“Certainly,” he answered promptly, “and a very proper classification, too.”

We all looked blank. “That’s rude,” said I at last.

“Truth is always rude, my dear,” he replied complacently. Then he added, “If Iwere commissioned to draw up a new legal code, and had previously enjoyed theprivilege, as I have been doing lately, of listening to the conversation of youthree young ladies, I should make precisely the same classification.”

Even Minora was incensed at this.

“You are telling us in the most unvarnished manner that we are idiots,” saidIrais.

“Idiots? No, no, by no means. But children,—nice little agreeable children. Ivery much like to hear you talk together. It is all so young and fresh what youthink and what you believe, and not of the least consequence to any one.”

“Not of the least consequence?” cried Minora. “What we believe is of very greatconsequence indeed to us.”

“Are you jeering at our beliefs?” inquired Irais sternly.

“Not for worlds. I would not on any account disturb or change your prettylittle beliefs. It is your chief charm that you always believe every-thing. Howdesperate would our case be if young ladies only believed facts, and neveraccepted another person’s assurance, but preferred the evidence of their owneyes! They would have no illusions, and a woman without illusions is thedreariest and most difficult thing to manage possible.”

“Thing?” protested Irais.

The Man of Wrath, usually so silent, makes up for it from time to time byholding forth at unnecessary length. He took up his stand now with his back tothe fire, and a glass of Glühweinin his hand. Minora had hardly heardhis voice before, so quiet had he been since she came, and sat with her pencilraised, ready to fix for ever the wisdom that should flow from his lips.

“What would become of poetry if women became so sensible that they turned adeaf ear to the poetic platitudes of love? That love does indulge in platitudesI suppose you will admit.” He looked at Irais.

“Yes, they all say exactly the same thing,” she acknowledged.

“Who could murmur pretty speeches on the beauty of a common sacrifice, if thelistener’s want of imagination was such as to enable her only to distinguishone victim in the picture, and that one herself?”

Minora took that down word for word,—much good may it do her.

“Who would be brave enough to affirm that if refused he will die, if hisassurances merely elicit a recommendation to diet himself, and take plenty ofoutdoor exercise? Women are responsible for such lies, because they believethem. Their amazing vanity makes them swallow flattery so gross that it is aninsult, and men will always be ready to tell the precise number of lies that awoman is ready to listen to. Who indulges more recklessly in glowingexaggerations than the lover who hopes, and has not yet obtained? He will, likethe nightingale, sing with unceasing modulations, display all his talent,untiringly repeat his sweetest notes, until he has what he wants, when hissong, like the nightingale’s, immediately ceases, never again to be heard.”

“Take that down,” murmured Irais aside to Minora—unnecessary advice, for herpencil was scribbling as fast as it could.

“A woman’s vanity is so immeasurable that, after having had ninety-nineobject-lessons in the difference between promise and performance and theemptiness of pretty speeches, the beginning of the hundredth will find herlending the same willing and enchanted ear to the eloquence of flattery as shedid on the occasion of the first. What can the exhortations of thestrong-minded sister, who has never had these experiences, do for such a woman?It is useless to tell her she is man’s victim, that she is his plaything, thatshe is cheated, down-trodden, kept under, laughed at, shabbily treated in everyway—that is not a true statement of the case. She is simply the victim of herown vanity, and against that, against the belief in her own fascinations,against the very part of herself that gives all the colour to her life, whoshall expect a woman to take up arms?”

“Are you so vain, Elizabeth?” inquired Irais with a shocked face, “and had youlent a willing ear to the blandishments of ninety-nine before you reached yourfinal destiny?”

“I am one of the sensible ones, I suppose,” I replied, “for nobody ever wantedme to listen to blandishments.”

Minora sighed.

“I like to hear you talk together about the position of women,” he went on,“and wonder when you will realise that they hold exactly the position they arefitted for. As soon as they are fit to occupy a better, no power on earth willbe able to keep them out of it. Meanwhile, let me warn you that, as things noware, only strong-minded women wish to see you the equals of men, and thestrong-minded are invariably plain. The pretty ones would rather see men theirslaves than their equals.”

“You know,” said Irais, frowning, “that I consider myself strong-minded.”

“And never rise till lunch-time?”

Irais blushed. Although I don’t approve of such conduct, it is very convenientin more ways than one; I get through my housekeeping undisturbed, and whenevershe is disposed to lecture me, I begin about this habit of hers. Her consciencemust be terribly stricken on the point, for she is by no means as a rule givento meekness.

“A woman without vanity would be unattackable,” resumed the Man of Wrath. “Whena girl enters that downward path that leads to ruin, she is led solely by herown vanity; for in these days of policemen no young woman can be forced againsther will from the path of virtue, and the cries of the injured are never hearduntil the destroyer begins to express his penitence for having destroyed. Ifhis passion could remain at white-heat and he could continue to feed her earwith the protestations she loves, no principles of piety or virtue woulddisturb the happiness of his companion; for a mournful experience teaches thatpiety begins only where passion ends, and that principles are strongest wheretemptations are most rare.”

“But what has all this to do with us?” I inquired severely.

“You were displeased at our law classing you as it does, and I merely wish tojustify it,” he answered. “Creatures who habitually say yestoeverything a man proposes, when no one can oblige them to say it, and when itis so often fatal, are plainly not responsible beings.”

“I shall never say it to you again, my dear man,” I said.

“And not only thatfatal weakness,” he continued, “but what is there,candidly, to distinguish you from children? You are older, but notwiser,—really not so wise, for with years you lose the common sense you had aschildren. Have you ever heard a group of women talking reasonably together?”

“Yes—we do!” Irais and I cried in a breath.

“It has interested me,” went on the Man of Wrath, “in my idle moments, tolisten to their talk. It amused me to hear the malicious little stories theytold of their best friends who were absent, to note the spiteful little digsthey gave their best friends who were present, to watch the utter incredulitywith which they listened to the tale of some other woman’s conquests, theradiant good faith they displayed in connection with their own, the instantcollapse into boredom, if some topic of so-called general interest, by someextraordinary chance, were introduced.”

“You must have belonged to a particularly nice set,” remarked Irais.

“And as for politics,” he said, “I have never heard them mentioned amongwomen.”

“Children and idiots are not interested in such things,” I said.

“And we are much too frightened of being put in prison,” said Irais.

“In prison?” echoed Minora.

“Don’t you know,” said Irais, turning to her “that if you talk about suchthings here you run a great risk of being imprisoned?”

“But why?”

“But why? Because, though you yourself may have meant nothing but what wasinnocent, your words may have suggested something less innocent to the evilminds of your hearers; and then the law steps in, and calls it doluseventualis, and everybody says how dreadful, and off you go to prison andare punished as you deserve to be.”

Minora looked mystified.

“That is not, however, your real reason for not discussing them,” said the Manof Wrath; “they simply do not interest you. Or it may be, that you do notconsider your female friends’ opinions worth listening to, for you certainlydisplay an astonishing thirst for information when male politicians arepresent. I have seen a pretty young woman, hardly in her twenties, sitting awhole evening drinking in the doubtful wisdom of an elderly political star,with every appearance of eager interest. He was a bimetallic star, and wasgiving her whole pamphletsful of information.”

“She wanted to make up to him for some reason,” said Irais, “and got him toexplain his hobby to her, and he was silly enough to be taken in. Now which wasthe sillier in that case?”

She threw herself back in her chair and looked up defiantly, beating her footimpatiently on the carpet.

“She wanted to be thought clever,” said the Man of Wrath. “What puzzled me,” hewent on musingly, “was that she went away apparently as serene and happy aswhen she came. The explanation of the principles of bimetallism produce, as arule, a contrary effect.”

“Why, she hadn’t been listening,” cried Irais, “and your simple star had beenmaking a fine goose of himself the whole evening.

“Prattle, prattle, simple star,
Bimetallic, wunderbar.
Though you’re given to describe
Woman as a dummes Weib.
You yourself are sillier far,
Prattling, bimetallic star!”

“No doubt she had understood very little,” said the Man of Wrath, taking nonotice of this effusion.

“And no doubt the gentleman hadn’t understood much either.” Irais was plainlyirritated.

“Your opinion of woman,” said Minora in a very small voice, “is not a high one.But, in the sick chamber, I suppose you agree that no one could take herplace?”

“If you are thinking of hospital-nurses,” I said, “I must tell you that Ibelieve he married chiefly that he might have a wife instead of a strange womanto nurse him when he is sick.”

“But,” said Minora, bewildered at the way her illusions were being knockedabout, “the sick-room is surely the very place of all others in which a woman’sgentleness and tact are most valuable.”

“Gentleness and tact?” repeated the Man of Wrath. “I have never met thosequalities in the professional nurse. According to my experience, she is adisagreeable person who finds in private nursing exquisite opportunities forasserting her superiority over ordinary and prostrate mankind. I know of nomore humiliating position for a man than to be in bed having his feverish browsoothed by a sprucely-dressed strange woman, bristling with starch andspotlessness. He would give half his income for his clothes, and probably theother half if she would leave him alone, and go away altogether. He feels hersuperiority through every pore; he never before realised how absolutelyinferior he is; he is abjectly polite, and contemptibly conciliatory; if afriend comes to see him, he eagerly praises her in case she should be listeningbehind the screen; he cannot call his soul his own, and, what is far moreintolerable, neither is he sure that his body really belongs to him; he hasread of ministering angels and the light touch of a woman’s hand, but the dayon which he can ring for his servant and put on his socks in private fills himwith the same sort of wildness of joy that he felt as a homesick schoolboy atthe end of his first term.”

Minora was silent. Irais’s foot was livelier than ever. The Man of Wrath stoodsmiling blandly down upon us. You can’t argue with a person so utterlyconvinced of his infallibility that he won’t even get angry with you; so we satround and said nothing.

“If,” he went on, addressing Irais, who looked rebellious, “you doubt the truthof my remarks, and still cling to the old poetic notion of noble,self-sacrificing women tenderly helping the patient over the rough places onthe road to death or recovery, let me beg you to try for yourself, next timeany one in your house is ill, whether the actual fact in any way corresponds tothe picturesque belief. The angel who is to alleviate our sufferings comes insuch a questionable shape, that to the unimaginative she appears merely as anextremely self-confident young woman, wisely concerned first of all in securingher personal comfort, much given to complaints about her food and tohelplessness where she should be helpful, possessing an extraordinary capacityfor fancying herself slighted, or not regarded as the superior being she knowsherself to be, morbidly anxious lest the servants should, by some mistake,treat her with offensive cordiality, pettish if the patient gives more troublethan she had expected, intensely injured and disagreeable if he is made socourageous by his wretchedness as to wake her during the night—an act ofdesperation of which I was guilty once, and once only. Oh, these good women!What sane man wants to have to do with angels? And especially do we object tohaving them about us when we are sick and sorry, when we feel in every fibrewhat poor things we are, and when all our fortitude is needed to enable us tobear our temporary inferiority patiently, without being forced besides toassume an attitude of eager and grovelling politeness towards the angel in thehouse.”

There was a pause.

“I didn’t know you could talk so much, Sage,” said Irais at length.

“What would you have women do, then?” asked Minora meekly. Irais began to beather foot up and down again,—what did it matter what Men of Wrath would have usdo? “There are not,” continued Minora, blushing, “husbands enough for everyone, and the rest must do something.”

“Certainly,” replied the oracle. “Study the art of pleasing by dress and manneras long as you are of an age to interest us, and above all, let all women,pretty and plain, married and single, study the art of cookery. If you are anartist in the kitchen you will always be esteemed.”

I sat very still. Every German woman, even the wayward Irais, has learned tocook; I seem to have been the only one who was naughty and wouldn’t.

“Only be careful,” he went on, “in studying both arts, never to forget thegreat truth that dinner precedes blandishments and not blandishments dinner. Aman must be made comfortable before he will make love to you; and though it istrue that if you offered him a choice between Spickgansand kisses, hewould say he would take both, yet he would invariably begin with theSpickgans, and allow the kisses to wait.”

At this I got up, and Irais followed my example. “Your cynicism is disgusting,”I said icily.

“You two are always exceptions to anything I may say,” he said, smilingamiably.

He stooped and kissed Irais’s hand. She is inordinately vain of her hands, andsays her husband married her for their sake, which I can quite believe. I amglad they are on her and not on Minora, for if Minora had had them I shouldhave been annoyed. Minora’s are bony, with chilly-looking knuckles, ignorednails, and too much wrist. I feel very well disposed towards her when my eyefalls on them. She put one forward now, evidently thinking it would be kissedtoo.

“Did you know,” said Irais, seeing the movement, “that it is the custom here tokiss women’s hands?”

“But only married women’s,” I added, not desiring her to feel out of it, “neveryoung girls’.”

She drew it in again. “It is a pretty custom,” she said with a sigh; andpensively inscribed it in her book.

January15th.—The bills for my roses and bulbs and other lastyear’s horticultural indulgences were all on the table when I came down tobreakfast this morning. They rather frightened me. Gardening is expensive, Ifind, when it has to be paid for out of one’s own private pin-money. The Man ofWrath does not in the least want roses, or flowering shrubs, or plantations, ornew paths, and therefore, he asks, why should he pay for them? So he does notand I do, and I have to make up for it by not indulging all too riotously innew clothes, which is no doubt very chastening. I certainly prefer buying newrose-trees to new dresses, if I cannot comfortably have both; and I see a timecoming when the passion for my garden will have taken such a hold on me that Ishall not only entirely cease buying more clothes, but begin to sell those thatI already have. The garden is so big that everything has to be boughtwholesale; and I fear I shall not be able to go on much longer with only oneman and a stork, because the more I plant the more there will be to water inthe inevitable drought, and the watering is a serious consideration when itmeans going backwards and forwards all day long to a pump near the house, witha little water-cart. People living in England, in almost perpetual mildness andmoisture, don’t really know what a drought is. If they have some weeks ofcloudless weather, it is generally preceded and followed by good rains; but wehave perhaps an hour’s shower every week, and then comes a month or six weeks’drought. The soil is very light, and dries so quickly that, after the heaviestthunder-shower, I can walk over any of my paths in my thin shoes; and to keepthe garden even moderately damp it should pour with rain regularly every dayfor three hours. My only means of getting water is to go to the pump near thehouse, or to the little stream that forms my eastern boundary, and the littlestream dries up too unless there has been rain, and is at the best of timesdifficult to get at, having steep banks covered with forget-me-nots. I possessone moist, peaty bit of ground, and that is to be planted with silver birchesin imitation of the Hirschwald, and is to be carpeted between the birches withflaming azaleas. All the rest of my soil is sandy—the soil for pines andacacias, but not the soil for roses; yet see what love will do—there are moreroses in my garden than any other flower! Next spring the bare places are to befilled with trees that I have ordered: pines behind the delicate acacias, andstartling mountain-ashes, oaks, copper-beeches, maples, larches,juniper-trees—was it not Elijah who sat down to rest under a juniper-tree? Ihave often wondered how he managed to get under it. It is a compact littletree, not more than two to three yards high here, and all closely squeezed uptogether. Perhaps they grew more aggressively where he was. By the time thebabies have grown old and disagreeable it will be very pretty here, and thenpossibly they won’t like it; and, if they have inherited the Man of Wrath’sindifference to gardens, they will let it run wild and leave it to return tothe state in which I found it. Or perhaps their three husbands will refuse tolive in it, or to come to such a lonely place at all, and then of course itsfate is sealed. My only comfort is that husbands don’t flourish in the desert,and that the three will have to wait a long time before enough are found to goround. Mothers tell me that it is a dreadful business finding one husband; howmuch more painful then to have to look for three at once!—the babies are sonearly the same age that they only just escaped being twins. But I won’t look.I can imagine nothing more uncomfortable than a son-in-law, and besides, Idon’t think a husband is at all a good thing for a girl to have. I shall do mybest in the years at my disposal to train them so to love the garden, andout-door life, and even farming, that, if they have a spark of their mother inthem, they will want and ask for nothing better. My hope of success is howeverexceedingly small, and there is probably a fearful period in store for me whenI shall be taken every day during the winter to the distant towns to balls—apoor old mother shivering in broad daylight in her party gown, and being madeto start after an early lunch and not getting home till breakfast-time nextmorning. Indeed, they have already developed an alarming desire to go to“partings” as they call them, the April baby announcing her intention ofbeginning to do so when she is twelve. “Are youtwelve, Mummy?” sheasked.

The gardener is leaving on the first of April, and I am trying to find another.It is grievous changing so often—in two years I shall have had three—because ateach change a great part of my plants and plans necessarily suffers. Seeds getlost, seedlings are not pricked out in time, places already sown are plantedwith something else, and there is confusion out of doors and despair in myheart. But he was to have married the cook, and the cook saw a ghost andimmediately left, and he is going after her as soon as he can, and meanwhile iswasting visibly away. What she saw was doors that are locked opening with agreat clatter all by themselves on the hinge-side, and then somebodyinvisible cursed at her. These phenomena now go by the name of “the ghost.” Sheasked to be allowed to leave at once, as she had never been in a place wherethere was a ghost before. I suggested that she should try and get used to it;but she thought it would be wasting time, and she looked so ill that I let hergo, and the garden has to suffer. I don’t know why it should be given to cooksto see such interesting things and withheld from me, but I have had two otherssince she left, and they both have seen the ghost. Minora grows very silent asbed-time approaches, and relents towards Irais and myself; and, after havingshown us all day how little she approves us, when the bedroom candles arebrought she quite begins to cling. She has once or twice anxiously inquiredwhether Irais is sure she does not object to sleeping alone.

“If you are at all nervous, I will come and keep you company,” she said; “Idon’t mind at all, I assure you.”

But Irais is not to be taken in by such simple wiles, and has told me she wouldrather sleep with fifty ghosts than with one Minora.

Since Miss Jones was so unexpectedly called away to her parent’s bedside I haveseen a good deal of the babies; and it is so nice without a governess that Iwould put off engaging another for a year or two, if it were not that I shouldin so doing come within the reach of the arm of the law, which is what everyGerman spends his life in trying to avoid. The April baby will be six nextmonth, and, after her sixth birthday is passed, we are liable at any moment toreceive a visit from a school inspector, who will inquire curiously into thestate of her education, and, if it is not up to the required standard, allsorts of fearful things might happen to the guilty parents, probably beginningwith fines, and going on crescendoto dungeons if, owing to gaps betweengovernesses and difficulties in finding the right one, we persisted in our evilcourses. Shades of the prison-house begin to close here upon the growing boy,and prisons compass the Teuton about on every side all through life to such anextent that he has to walk very delicately indeed if he would stay outside themand pay for their maintenance. Cultured individuals do not, as a rule, neglectto teach their offspring to read, and write, and say their prayers, and are aptto resent the intrusion of an examining inspector into their homes; but it doesnot much matter after all, and I daresay it is very good for us to be worried;indeed, a philosopher of my acquaintance declares that people who are notregularly and properly worried are never any good for anything. In the eye ofthe law we are all sinners, and every man is held to be guilty until he hasproved that he is innocent.

Minora has seen so much of the babies that, after vainly trying to get out oftheir way for several days, she thought it better to resign herself, and makethe best of it by regarding them as copy, and using them to fill a chapter inher book. So she took to dogging their footsteps wherever they went, attendedtheir uprisings and their lyings down, engaged them, if she could, inintelligent conversation, went with them into the garden to study their wayswhen they were sleighing, drawn by a big dog, and generally made their lives aburden to them. This went on for three days, and then she settled down to writethe result with the Man of Wrath’s typewriter, borrowed whenever her notes forany chapter have reached the state of ripeness necessary for the process shedescribes as “throwing into form.” She writes everything with a typewriter,even her private letters.

“Don’t forget to put in something about a mother’s knee,” said Irais; “youcan’t write effectively about children without that.”

“Oh, of course I shall mention that,” replied Minora.

“And pink toes,” I added. “There are always toes, and they are never anythingbut pink.”

“I have that somewhere,” said Minora, turning over her notes.

“But, after all, babies are not a German speciality,” said Irais, “and I don’tquite see why you should bring them into a book of German travels. Elizabeth’sbabies have each got the fashionable number of arms and legs, and are exactlythe same as English ones.”

“Oh, but they can’t be justthe same, you know,” said Minora, lookingworried. “It must make a difference living here in this place, and eating suchodd things, and never having a doctor, and never being ill. Children who havenever had measles and those things can’t be quite the same as other children;it must all be in their systems and can’t get out for some reason or other. Anda child brought up on chicken and rice-pudding must be different to a childthat eats Spickgansand liver sausages. And they aredifferent; Ican’t tell in what way, but they certainly are; and I think if I steadilydescribe them from the materials I have collected the last three days, I mayperhaps hit on the points of difference.”

“Why bother about points of difference?” asked Irais. “I should write somelittle thing, bringing in the usual parts of the picture, such as knees andtoes, and make it mildly pathetic.”

“But it is by no means an easy thing for me to do,” said Minora plaintively; “Ihave so little experience of children.”

“Then why write it at all?” asked that sensible person Elizabeth.

“I have as little experience as you,” said Irais, “because I have no children;but if you don’t yearn after startling originality, nothing is easier than towrite bits about them. I believe I could do a dozen in an hour.”

She sat down at the writing-table, took up an old letter, and scribbled forabout five minutes. “There,” she said, throwing it to Minora, “you may haveit—pink toes and all complete.”

Minora put on her eye-glasses and read aloud:

“When my baby shuts her eyes and sings her hymns at bed-time my stale andbattered soul is filled with awe. All sorts of vague memories crowd into mymind—memories of my own mother and myself—how many years ago!—of the sweethelplessness of being gathered up half asleep in her arms, and undressed, andput in my cot, without being wakened; of the angels I believed in; of littlechildren coming straight from heaven, and still being surrounded, so long asthey were good, by the shadow of white wings,—all the dear poetic nonsenselearned, just as my baby is learning it, at her mother’s knee. She has not anidea of the beauty of the charming things she is told, and stares wide-eyed,with heavenly eyes, while her mother talks of the heaven she has so lately comefrom, and is relieved and comforted by the interrupting bread and milk. At twoyears old she does not understand angels, and does understand bread and milk;at five she has vague notions about them, and prefers bread and milk; at tenboth bread and milk and angels have been left behind in the nursery, and shehas already found out that they are luxuries not necessary to her everydaylife. In later years she may be disinclined to accept truths second-hand,insist on thinking for herself, be earnest in her desire to shake off explodedtraditions, be untiring in her efforts to live according to a high moralstandard and to be strong, and pure, and good—”

“Like tea,” explained Irais.

“—yet will she never, with all her virtues, possess one-thousandth part of thecharm that clung about her when she sang, with quiet eyelids, her firstreluctant hymns, kneeling on her mother’s knees. I love to come in at bed-timeand sit in the window in the setting sunshine watching the mysteries of hergoing to bed. Her mother tubs her, for she is far too precious to be touched byany nurse, and then she is rolled up in a big bath towel, and only her littlepink toes peep out; and when she is powdered, and combed, and tied up in hernight-dress, and all her curls are on end, and her ears glowing, she is kneltdown on her mother’s lap, a little bundle of fragrant flesh, and her facereflects the quiet of her mother’s face as she goes through her evening prayerfor pity and for peace.”

“How very curious!” said Minora, when she had finished. “That is exactly what Iwas going to say.”

“Oh, then I have saved you the trouble of putting it together; you can copythat if you like.”

“But have you a stale soul, Miss Minora?” I asked.

“Well, do you know, I rather think that is a good touch,” she replied; “it willmake people really think a man wrote the book. You know I am going to take aman’s name.”

“That is precisely what I imagined,” said Irais. “You will call yourself JohnJones, or George Potts, or some such sternly commonplace name, to emphasiseyour uncompromising attitude towards all feminine weaknesses, and no one willbe taken in.”

“I really think, Elizabeth,” said Irais to me later, when the click of Minora’stypewriter was heard hesitating in the next room, “that you and I are writingher book for her. She takes down everything we say. Why does she copy all thatabout the baby? I wonder why mothers’ knees are supposed to be touching? Inever learned anything at them, did you? But then in my case they were onlystepmother’s, and nobody ever sings their praises.”

“My mother was always at parties,” I said; “and the nurse made me say myprayers in French.”

“And as for tubs and powder,” went on Irais, “when I was a baby such thingswere not the fashion. There were never any bathrooms, and no tubs; our facesand hands were washed, and there was a foot-bath in the room, and in the summerwe had a bath and were put to bed afterwards for fear we might catch cold. Mystepmother didn’t worry much; she used to wear pink dresses all over lace, andthe older she got the prettier the dresses got. When is she going?”

“Who? Minora? I haven’t asked her that.”

“Then I will. It is really bad for her art to be neglected like this. She hasbeen here an unconscionable time,—it must be nearly three weeks.”

“Yes, she came the same day you did,” I said pleasantly.

Irais was silent. I hope she was reflecting that it is not worse to neglectone’s art than one’s husband, and her husband is lying all this time stretchedon a bed of sickness, while she is spending her days so agreeably with me. Shehas a way of forgetting that she has a home, or any other business in the worldthan just to stay on chatting with me, and reading, and singing, and laughingat any one there is to laugh at, and kissing the babies, and tilting with theMan of Wrath. Naturally I love her—she is so pretty that anybody with eyes inhis head must love her—but too much of anything is bad, and next month thepassages and offices are to be whitewashed, and people who have everwhitewashed their houses inside know what nice places they are to live in whileit is being done; and there will be no dinner for Irais, and none of thosesucculent salads full of caraway seeds that she so devotedly loves. I shallbegin to lead her thoughts gently back to her duties by inquiring every dayanxiously after her husband’s health. She is not very fond of him, because hedoes not run and hold the door open for her every time she gets up to leave theroom; and though she has asked him to do so, and told him how much she wisheshe would, he still won’t. She stayed once in a house where there was anEnglishman, and his nimbleness in regard to doors and chairs so impressed herthat her husband has had no peace since, and each time she has to go out of aroom she is reminded of her disregarded wishes, so that a shut door is to hersymbolic of the failure of her married life, and the very sight of one makesher wonder why she was born; at least, that is what she told me once, in aburst of confidence. He is quite a nice, harmless little man, pleasant to talkto, good-tempered, and full of fun; but he thinks he is too old to begin tolearn new and uncomfortable ways, and he has that horror of being made betterby his wife that distinguishes so many righteous men, and is shared by the Manof Wrath, who persists in holding his glass in his left hand at meals, becauseif he did not (and I don’t believe he particularly likes doing it) hisrelations might say that marriage has improved him, and thus drive the ironinto his soul. This habit occasions an almost daily argument between one orother of the babies and myself.

“April, hold your glass in your right hand.”

“But papa doesn’t.”

“When you are as old as papa you can do as you like.”

Which was embellished only yesterday by Minora adding impressively, “And onlythink how strange it would look if everybodyheld their glasses so.”

April was greatly struck by the force of this proposition.

January28th.—It is very cold,—fifteen degrees of frostRéaumur, but perfectly delicious, still, bright weather, and one feelsjolly and energetic and amiably disposed towards everybody. The two youngladies are still here, but the air is so buoyant that even they don’t weigh onme any longer, and besides, they have both announced their approachingdeparture, so that after all I shall get my whitewashing done in peace, and thehouse will have on its clean pinafore in time to welcome the spring.

Minora has painted my portrait, and is going to present it as a parting gift tothe Man of Wrath; and the fact that I let her do it, and sat meekly timesinnumerable, proves conclusively, I hope, that I am not vain. When Irais firstsaw it she laughed till she cried, and at once commissioned her to paint hers,so that she may take it away with her and give it to her husband on hisbirthday, which happens to be early in February. Indeed, if it were not forthis birthday, I really think she would have forgotten to go at all; butbirthdays are great and solemn festivals with us, never allowed to slip byunnoticed, and always celebrated in the presence of a sympathetic crowd ofrelations (gathered from far and near to tell you how well you are wearing, andthat nobody would ever dream, and that really it is wonderful), who stand rounda sort of sacrificial altar, on which your years are offered up as aburnt-offering to the gods in the shape of lighted pink and white candles,stuck in a very large, flat, jammy cake. The cake with its candles is the chieffeature, and on the table round it lie the gifts each person present is more orless bound to give. As my birthday falls in the winter I get mittens as well asblotting-books and photograph-frames, and if it were in the summer I should getphotograph-frames and blotting-books and no mittens; but whatever the presentmay be, and by whomsoever given, it has to be welcomed with the noisiestgratitude, and loudest exclamations of joy, and such words as entzückend,reizend, herrlich, wundervoll, and süssrepeated over and overagain, until the unfortunate Geburtstagskindfeels indeed that anotheryear has gone, and that she has grown older, and wiser, and more tired of follyand of vain repetitions. A flag is hoisted, and all the morning the rites arecelebrated, the cake eaten, healths drunk, speeches made, and hands nearlyshaken off. The neighbouring parsons drive up, and when nobody is looking theirwives count the candles in the cake; the active lady in the next Schlossspares time to send a pot of flowers, and to look up my age in the GothaAlmanach;a deputation comes from the farms headed by the chief inspectorin white kid gloves who invokes Heaven’s blessings on the gracious lady’s head;and the babies are enchanted, and sit in a corner trying on all the mittens. Inthe evening there is a dinner for the relations and the chief localauthorities, with more health-drinking and speechifying, and the next morning,when I come downstairs thankful to have done with it, I am confronted by thealtar still in its place, cake crumbs and candle-grease and all, because anyhasty removal of it would imply a most lamentable want of sentiment, deplorablein anybody, but scandalous and disgusting in a tender female. All birthdays areobserved in this fashion, and not a few wise persons go for a short trip justabout the time theirs is due, and I think I shall imitate them next year; onlytrips to the country or seaside in December are not usually pleasant, and if Igo to a town there are sure to be relations in it, and then the cake willspring up mushroom-like from the teeming soil of their affection.

I hope it has been made evident in these pages how superior Irais and myselfare to the ordinary weaknesses of mankind; if any further proof were needed, itis furnished by the fact that we both, in defiance of tradition, scorn thiscelebration of birthday rites. Years ago, when first I knew her, and longbefore we were either of us married, I sent her a little brass candlestick onher birthday; and when mine followed a few months later, she sent me anote-book. No notes were written in it, and on her next birthday I presented itto her; she thanked me profusely in the customary manner, and when my turn cameI received the brass candlestick. Since then we alternately enjoy thepossession of each of these articles, and the present question is comfortablysettled once and for all, at a minimum of trouble and expense. We never mentionthis little arrangement except at the proper time, when we send a letter offervid thanks.

This radiant weather, when mere living is a joy, and sitting still over thefire out of the question, has been going on for more than a week. Sleighing andskating have been our chief occupation, especially skating, which is more thanusually fascinating here, because the place is intersected by small canalscommunicating with a lake and the river belonging to the lake, and aseverything is frozen black and hard, we can skate for miles straight aheadwithout being obliged to turn round and come back again,—at all times anannoying, and even mortifying, proceeding. Irais skates beautifully: modesty isthe only obstacle to my saying the same of myself; but I may remark that allGermans skate well, for the simple reason that every year of their lives, forthree or four months, they may do it as much as they like. Minora wasastonished and disconcerted by finding herself left behind, and arriving at theplace where tea meets us half an hour after we had finished. In some places thebanks of the canals are so high that only our heads appear level with thefields, and it is, as Minora noted in her book, a curious sight to see threefemale heads skimming along apparently by themselves, and enjoying ittremendously. When the banks are low, we appear to be gliding deliciously overthe roughest ploughed fields, with or without legs according to circumstances.Before we start, I fix on the place where tea and a sleigh are to meet us, andwe drive home again; because skating against the wind is as detestable asskating with it is delightful, and an unkind Nature arranges its blowingwithout the smallest regard for our convenience. Yesterday, by way of a change,we went for a picnic to the shores of the Baltic, ice-bound at this season, andutterly desolate at our nearest point. I have a weakness for picnics,especially in winter, when the mosquitoes cease from troubling and theant-hills are at rest; and of all my many favourite picnic spots this one onthe Baltic is the loveliest and best. As it is a three-hours’ drive, the Man ofWrath is loud in his lamentations when the special sort of weather comes whichmeans, as experience has taught him, this particular excursion. There must bedeep snow, hard frost, no wind, and a cloudless sky; and when, on waking up, Isee these conditions fulfilled, then it would need some very potent reason tokeep me from having out a sleigh and going off. It is, I admit, a hard day forthe horses; but why have horses if they are not to take you where you want togo to, and at the time you want to go? And why should not horses have hard daysas well as everybody else? The Man of Wrath loathes picnics, and has no eye fornature and frozen seas, and is simply bored by a long drive through a forestthat does not belong to him; a single turnip on his own place is more admirablein his eyes than the tallest, pinkest, straightest pine that ever reared itssnow-crowned head against the setting sunlight. Now observe the superiority ofwoman, who sees that both are good, and after having gazed at the pine and beenmade happy by its beauty, goes home and placidly eats the turnip. He went onceand only once to this particular place, and made us feel so small by hisblasébehaviour that I never invite him now. It is a beautiful spot,endless forest stretching along the shore as far as the eye can reach; andafter driving through it for miles you come suddenly, at the end of an avenueof arching trees, upon the glistening, oily sea, with the orange-coloured sailsof distant fishing-smacks shining in the sunlight. Whenever I have been thereit has been windless weather, and the silence so profound that I could hear mypulses beating. The humming of insects and the sudden scream of a jay are theonly sounds in summer, and in winter the stillness is the stillness of death.

Every paradise has its serpent, however, and this one is so infested bymosquitoes during the season when picnics seem most natural, that those of myvisitors who have been taken there for a treat have invariably lost theirtempers, and made the quiet shores ring with their wailing and lamentations.These despicable but irritating insects don’t seem to have anything to do butto sit in multitudes on the sand, waiting for any prey Providence may sendthem; and as soon as the carriage appears they rise up in a cloud, and rush tomeet us, almost dragging us out bodily, and never leave us until we drive awayagain. The sudden view of the sea from the mossy, pine-covered height directlyabove it where we picnic; the wonderful stretch of lonely shore with the forestto the water’s edge; the coloured sails in the blue distance; the freshness,the brightness, the vastness—all is lost upon the picnickers, and made worsethan indifferent to them, by the perpetual necessity they are under of fightingthese horrid creatures. It is nice being the only person who ever goes there orshows it to anybody, but if more people went, perhaps the mosquitoes would beless lean, and hungry, and pleased to see us. It has, however, the advantage ofbeing a suitable place to which to take refractory visitors when they havestayed too long, or left my books out in the garden all night, or otherwisemade their presence a burden too grievous to be borne; then one fine hotmorning when they are all looking limp, I suddenly propose a picnic on theBaltic. I have never known this proposal fail to be greeted with exclamationsof surprise and delight.

“The Baltic! You never told us you were within driving distance? Howheavenlyto get a breath of sea air on a day like this! The verythoughtputs new life into one! And how delightfulto see theBaltic! Oh, pleasetake us!” And then I take them.

But on a brilliant winter’s day my conscience is as clear as the frosty airitself, and yesterday morning we started off in the gayest of spirits, evenMinora being disposed to laugh immoderately on the least provocation. Only oureyes were allowed to peep out from the fur and woollen wrappings necessary toour heads if we would come back with our ears and noses in the same places theywere in when we started, and for the first two miles the mirth created by eachother’s strange appearance was uproarious,—a fact I mention merely to show whatan effect dry, bright, intense cold produces on healthy bodies, and how muchbetter it is to go out in it and enjoy it than to stay indoors and sulk. As wepassed through the neighbouring village with cracking of whip and jingling ofbells, heads popped up at the windows to stare, and the only living thing inthe silent, sunny street was a melancholy fowl with ruffled feathers, whichlooked at us reproachfully, as we dashed with so much energy over the cracklingsnow.

“Oh, foolish bird!” Irais called out as we passed; “you’ll be indeed a coldfowl if you stand there motionless, and every one prefers them hot in weatherlike this!”

And then we all laughed exceedingly, as though the most splendid joke had beenmade, and before we had done we were out of the village and in the open countrybeyond, and could see my house and garden far away behind, glittering in thesunshine; and in front of us lay the forest, with its vistas of pinesstretching away into infinity, and a drive through it of fourteen miles beforewe reached the sea. It was a hoar-frost day, and the forest was an enchantedforest leading into fairyland, and though Irais and I have been there oftenbefore, and always thought it beautiful, yet yesterday we stood under the finalarch of frosted trees, struck silent by the sheer loveliness of the place. Fora long way out the sea was frozen, and then there was a deep blue line, and acluster of motionless orange sails; at our feet a narrow strip of pale yellowsand; right and left the line of sparkling forest; and we ourselves standing ina world of white and diamond traceries. The stillness of an eternal Sunday layon the place like a benediction.

Minora broke the silence by remarking that Dresden was pretty, but she thoughtthis beat it almost.

“I don’t quite see,” said Irais in a hushed voice, as though she were in a holyplace, “how the two can be compared.”

“Yes, Dresden is more convenient, of course,” replied Minora; after which weturned away and thought we would keep her quiet by feeding her, so we went backto the sleigh and had the horses taken out and their cloths put on, and theywere walked up and down a distant glade while we sat in the sleigh andpicnicked. It isa hard day for the horses,—nearly thirty miles thereand back and no stable in the middle; but they are so fat and spoiled that itcannot do them much harm sometimes to taste the bitterness of life. I warmedsoup in a little apparatus I have for such occasions, which helped to take thechilliness off the sandwiches,—this is the only unpleasant part of a winterpicnic, the clammy quality of the provisions just when you most long forsomething very hot. Minora let her nose very carefully out of its wrappings,took a mouthful, and covered it up quickly again. She was nervous lest itshould be frost-nipped, and truth compels me to add that her nose is not a badnose, and might even be pretty on anybody else; but she does not know how tocarry it, and there is an art in the angle at which one’s nose is held just asin everything else, and really noses were intended for something besides mereblowing.

It is the most difficult thing in the world to eat sandwiches with immense furand woollen gloves on, and I think we ate almost as much fur as anything, andchoked exceedingly during the process. Minora was angry at this, and at lastpulled off her glove, but quickly put it on again.

“How very unpleasant,” she remarked after swallowing a large piece of fur.

“It will wrap round your pipes, and keep them warm,” said Irais.

“Pipes!” echoed Minora, greatly disgusted by such vulgarity.

“I’m afraid I can’t help you,” I said, as she continued to choke and splutter;“we are all in the same case, and I don’t know how to alter it.”

“There are such things as forks, I suppose,” snapped Minora.

“That’s true,” said I, crushed by the obviousness of the remedy; but of whatuse are forks if they are fifteen miles off? So Minora had to continue to eather gloves.

By the time we had finished, the sun was already low behind the trees and theclouds beginning to flush a faint pink. The old coachman was given sandwichesand soup, and while he led the horses up and down with one hand and held hislunch in the other, we packed up—or, to be correct, I packed, and the otherslooked on and gave me valuable advice.

This coachman, Peter by name, is seventy years old, and was born on the place,and has driven its occupants for fifty years, and I am nearly as fond of him asI am of the sun-dial; indeed, I don’t know what I should do without him, soentirely does he appear to understand and approve of my tastes and wishes. Nodrive is too long or difficult for the horses if I want to take it, no placeimpossible to reach if I want to go to it, no weather or roads too bad toprevent my going out if I wish to: to all my suggestions he responds with thereadiest cheerfulness, and smoothes away all objections raised by the Man ofWrath, who rewards his alacrity in doing my pleasure by speaking of him as analter Esel. In the summer, on fine evenings, I love to drive late andalone in the scented forests, and when I have reached a dark part stop, and sitquite still, listening to the nightingales repeating their little tune over andover again after interludes of gurgling, or if there are no nightingales,listening to the marvellous silence, and letting its blessedness descend intomy very soul. The nightingales in the forests about here all sing the sametune, and in the same key of (E flat).

I don’t know whether all nightingales do this, or if it is peculiar to thisparticular spot. When they have sung it once, they clear their throats alittle, and hesitate, and then do it again, and it is the prettiest little songin the world. How could I indulge my passion for these drives with their pauseswithout Peter? He is so used to them that he stops now at the right momentwithout having to be told, and he is ready to drive me all night if I wish it,with no sign of anything but cheerful willingness on his nice old face. The Manof Wrath deplores these eccentric tastes, as he calls them, of mine; but hasgiven up trying to prevent my indulging them because, while he is deploring inone part of the house, I have slipped out at a door in the other, and am gonebefore he can catch me, and have reached and am lost in the shadows of theforest by the time he has discovered that I am nowhere to be found.

The brightness of Peter’s perfections are sullied however by one spot, and thatis, that as age creeps upon him, he not only cannot hold the horses in if theydon’t want to be held in, but he goes to sleep sometimes on his box if I havehim out too soon after lunch, and has upset me twice within the last year—oncelast winter out of a sleigh, and once this summer, when the horses shied at abicycle, and bolted into the ditch on one side of the chaussée(Germanfor high road), and the bicycle was so terrified at the horses shying that itshied too into the ditch on the other side, and the carriage was smashed, andthe bicycle was smashed, and we were all very unhappy, except Peter, who neverlost his pleasant smile, and looked so placid that my tongue clave to the roofof my mouth when I tried to make it scold him.

“But I should think he ought to have been thoroughlyscolded on anoccasion like that,” said Minora, to whom I had been telling this story as wewandered on the yellow sands while the horses were being put in the sleigh; andshe glanced nervously up at Peter, whose mild head was visible between thebushes above us. “Shall we get home before dark?” she asked.

The sun had altogether disappeared behind the pines and only the very highestof the little clouds were still pink; out at sea the mists were creeping up,and the sails of the fishing-smacks had turned a dull brown; a flight of wildgeese passed across the disc of the moon with loud cacklings.

“Before dark?” echoed Irais, “I should think not. It is dark now nearly in theforest, and we shall have the loveliest moonlight drive back.”

“But it is surely very dangerous to let a man who goes to sleep drive you,”said Minora apprehensively.

“But he’s such an old dear,” I said.

“Yes, yes, no doubt,” she replied testily; “but there are wakeful old dears tobe had, and on a box they are preferable.”

Irais laughed. “You are growing quite amusing, Miss Minora,” she said.

“He isn’t on a box to-day,” said I; “and I never knew him to go to sleepstanding up behind us on a sleigh.” But Minora was not to be appeased, andmuttered something about seeing no fun in foolhardiness, which shows howalarmed she was, for it was rude.

Peter, however, behaved beautifully on the way home, and Irais and I at leastwere as happy as possible driving back, with all the glories of the western skyflashing at us every now and then at the end of a long avenue as we swiftlypassed, and later on, when they had faded, myriads of stars in the narrow blackstrip of sky over our heads. It was bitterly cold, and Minora was silent, andnot in the least inclined to laugh with us as she had been six hours before.

“Have you enjoyed yourself, Miss Minora?’ inquired Irais, as we got out of theforest on to the chaussée, and the lights of the village before ourstwinkled in the distance.

“How many degrees do you suppose there are now?” was Minora’s reply to thisquestion.

“Degrees?—Of frost? Oh, dear me, are you cold,” cried Irais solicitously.

“Well, it isn’t exactly warm, is it?” said Minora sulkily; and Irais pinchedme. “Well, but think how much colder you would have been without all that furyou ate for lunch inside you,” she said.

“And what a nice chapter you will be able to write about the Baltic,” said I.“Why, it is practically certain that you are the first English person who hasever been to just this part of it.”

“Isn’t there some English poem,” said Irais, “about being the first who everburst—”

“‘Into that silent sea,’” finished Minora hastily. “You can’t quote thatwithout its context, you know.”

“But I wasn’t going to,” said Irais meekly; “I only paused to breathe. I mustbreathe, or perhaps I might die.”

The lights from my energetic friend’s Schlossshone brightly down uponus as we passed round the base of the hill on which it stands; she is veryproud of this hill, as well she may be, seeing that it is the only one in thewhole district.

“Do you never go there?” asked Minora, jerking her head in the direction of thehouse.

“Sometimes. She is a very busy woman, and I should feel I was in the way if Iwent often.”

“It would be interesting to see another North German interior,” said Minora;“and I should be obliged if you would take me.”

“But I can’t fall upon her suddenly with a strange girl,” I protested; “and weare not at all on such intimate terms as to justify my taking all my visitorsto see her.”

“What do you want to see another interior for?” asked Irais. “I can tell youwhat it is like; and if you went nobody would speak to you, and if you were toask questions, and began to take notes, the good lady would stare at you in thefrankest amazement, and think Elizabeth had brought a young lunatic out for anairing. Everybodyis not as patient as Elizabeth,” added Irais, anxiousto pay off old scores.

“I would do a great deal for you, Miss Minora,” I said, “but I can’t do that.”

“If we went,” said Irais, “Elizabeth and I would be placed with great ceremonyon a sofa behind a large, polished oval table with a crochet-mat in thecentre—it hasgot a crochet-mat in the centre, hasn’t it?” I nodded.“And you would sit on one of the four little podgy, buttony, tasselly redchairs that are ranged on the other side of the table facing the sofa. Theyarered, Elizabeth?” Again I nodded. “The floor is painted yellow, andthere is no carpet except a rug in front of the sofa. The paper is darkchocolate colour, almost black; that is in order that after years of use thedirt may not show, and the room need not be done up. Dirt is like wickedness,you see, Miss Minora—its being there never matters; it is only when it shows somuch as to be apparent to everybody that we are ashamed of it. At intervalsround the high walls are chairs, and cabinets with lamps on them, and in onecorner is a great white cold stove—or is it majolica?” she asked, turning tome.

“No, it is white.”

“There are a great many lovely big windows, all ready to let in the air and thesun, but they are as carefully covered with brown lace curtains under heavystuff ones as though a whole row of houses were just opposite, with peeringeyes at every window trying to look in, instead of there only being fields, andtrees, and birds. No fire, no sunlight, no books, no flowers; but a consolingsmell of red cabbage coming up under the door, mixed, in due season, withsoapsuds.”

“When did you go there?” asked Minora.

“Ah, when did I go there indeed? When did I not go there? I have been callingthere all my life.”

Minora’s eyes rolled doubtfully first at me then at Irais from the depths ofher head-wrappings; they are large eyes with long dark eyelashes, and far be itfrom me to deny that each eye taken by itself is fine, but they are put in allwrong.

“The only thing you would learn there,” went on Irais, “would be thesignificance of sofa corners in Germany. If we three went there together, Ishould be ushered into the right-hand corner of the sofa, because it is theplace of honour, and I am the greatest stranger; Elizabeth would be invited toseat herself in the left-hand corner, as next in importance; the hostess wouldsit near us in an arm-chair; and you, as a person of no importance whatever,would either be left to sit where you could, or would be put on a chair facingus, and with the entire breadth of the table between us to mark the immensesocial gulf that separates the married woman from the mere virgin. These sofacorners make the drawing of nice distinctions possible in a way that nothingelse could. The world might come to an end, and create less sensation in doingit, than you would, Miss Minora, if by any chance you got into the right-handcorner of one. That you are put on a chair on the other side of the tableplaces you at once in the scale of precedence, and exactly defines your socialposition, or rather your complete want of a social position.” And Irais tiltedher nose ever so little heavenwards.

“Note it,” she added, “as the heading of your next chapter.”

“Note what?” asked Minora impatiently.

“Why, ‘The Subtle Significance of Sofas’, of course,” replied Irais. “If,” shecontinued, as Minora made no reply appreciative of this suggestion, “you wereto call unexpectedly, the bad luck which pursues the innocent would most likelymake you hit on a washing-day, and the distracted mistress of the house wouldkeep you waiting in the cold room so long while she changed her dress, that youwould begin to fear you were to be left to perish from want and hunger; andwhen she did appear, would show by the bitterness of her welcoming smile therage that was boiling in her heart.”

“But what has the mistress of the house to do with washing?”

“What has she to do with washing? Oh, you sweet innocent—pardon my familiarity,but such ignorance of country-life customs is very touching in one who iswriting a book about them.”

“Oh, I have no doubt I am very ignorant,” said Minora loftily.

“Seasons of washing,” explained Irais, “are seasons set apart by theHausfrauto be kept holy. They only occur every two or three months, andwhile they are going on the whole house is in an uproar, every otherconsideration sacrificed, husband and children sunk into insignificance, and noone approaching, or interfering with the mistress of the house during thesedays of purification, but at their peril.”

“You don’t really mean,” said Minora, “that you only wash your clothes fourtimes a year?”

“Yes, I do mean it,” replied Irais.

“Well, I think that is very disgusting,” said Minora emphatically.

Irais raised those pretty, delicate eyebrows of hers. “Then you must take careand not marry a German,” she said.

“But what is the object of it?” went on Minora.

“Why, to clean the linen, I suppose.”

“Yes, yes, but why only at such long intervals?”

“It is an outward and visible sign of vast possessions in the shape of linen.If you were to want to have your clothes washed every week, as you do inEngland, you would be put down as a person who only has just enough to lastthat length of time, and would be an object of general contempt.”

“But I should be a clean object,” cried Minora, “and my house would not be fullof accumulated dirt.”

We said nothing—there was nothing to be said.

“It must be a happy land, that England of yours,” Irais remarked after a whilewith a sigh—a beatific vision no doubt presenting itself to her mind of a landfull of washerwomen and agile gentlemen darting at door-handles.

“It is a cleanland, at any rate,” replied Minora.

“Idon’t want to go and live in it,” I said—for we were driving up tothe house, and a memory of fogs and umbrellas came into my mind as I looked upfondly at its dear old west front, and I felt that what I want is to live anddie just here, and that there never was such a happy woman as Elizabeth.

April18th.—I have been so busy ever since Irais and Minora leftthat I can hardly believe the spring is here, and the garden hurrying on itsgreen and flowered petticoat—only its petticoat as yet, for though theunderwood is a fairyland of tender little leaves, the trees above are stillquite bare.

February was gone before I well knew that it had come, so deeply was I engagedin making hot-beds, and having them sown with petunias, verbenas, and nicotinaaffinis; while no less than thirty are dedicated solely to vegetables, ithaving been borne in upon me lately that vegetables must be interesting thingsto grow, besides possessing solid virtues not given to flowers, and that Imight as well take the orchard and kitchen garden under my wing. So I haverushed in with all the zeal of utter inexperience, and my February eveningswere spent poring over gardening books, and my days in applying the freshlyabsorbed wisdom. Who says that February is a dull, sad, slow month in thecountry? It was of the cheerfullest, swiftest description here, and its milddays enabled me to get on beautifully with the digging and manuring, and filledmy rooms with snowdrops. The longer I live the greater is my respect andaffection for manure in all its forms, and already, though the year is soyoung, a considerable portion of its pin-money has been spent on artificialmanure. The Man of Wrath says he never met a young woman who spent her moneythat way before; I remarked that it must be nice to have an original wife; andhe retorted that the word original hardly described me, and that the wordeccentric was the one required. Very well, I suppose I am eccentric, since evenmy husband says so; but if my eccentricities are of such a practical nature asto result later in the biggest cauliflowers and tenderest lettuce in Prussia,why then he ought to be the first to rise up and call me blessed.

I sent to England for vegetable-marrow seeds, as they are not grown here, andpeople try and make boiled cucumbers take their place; but boiled cucumbers arenasty things, and I don’t see why marrows should not do here perfectly well.These, and primrose-roots, are the English contributions to my garden. Ibrought over the roots in a tin box last time I came from England, and amanxious to see whether they will consent to live here. Certain it is that theydon’t exist in the Fatherland, so I can only conclude the winter kills them,for surely, if such lovely things would grow, they never would have beenoverlooked. Irais is deeply interested in the experiment; she reads so manyEnglish books, and has heard so much about primroses, and they have got somixed up in her mind with leagues, and dames, and Disraelis, that she longs tosee this mysterious political flower, and has made me promise to telegraph whenit appears, and she will come over. But they are not going to do anything thisyear, and I only hope those cold days did not send them off to the Paradise offlowers. I am afraid their first impression of Germany was a chilly one.

Irais writes about once a week, and inquires after the garden and the babies,and announces her intention of coming back as soon as the numerous relationsstaying with her have left,—“which they won’t do,” she wrote the other day,“until the first frosts nip them off, when they will disappear like belateddahlias—double ones of course, for single dahlias are too charming to becompared to relations. I have every sort of cousin and uncle and aunt here, andhere they have been ever since my husband’s birthday—not the same ones exactly,but I get so confused that I never know where one ends and the other begins. Myhusband goes off after breakfast to look at his crops, he says, and I am leftat their mercy. I wish I had crops to go and look at—I should be grateful evenfor one, and would look at it from morning till night, and quite stare it outof countenance, sooner than stay at home and have the truth told me byenigmatic aunts. Do you know my Aunt Bertha? she, in particular, spends hertime propounding obscure questions for my solution. I get so tired and worriedtrying to guess the answers, which are always truths supposed to be good for meto hear. ‘Why do you wear your hair on your forehead?’ she asks,—and that setsme off wondering why I dowear it on my forehead, and what she wants toknow for, or whether she does know and only wants to know if I will answertruthfully. ‘I am sure I don’t know, aunt,’ I say meekly, after puzzling overit for ever so long; ‘perhaps my maid knows. Shall I ring and ask her?’ Andthen she informs me that I wear it so to hide an ugly line she says I have downthe middle of my forehead, and that betokens a listless and discontenteddisposition. Well, if she knew, what did she ask me for? Whenever I am withthem they ask me riddles like that, and I simply lead a dog’slife. Oh,my dear, relations are like drugs,—useful sometimes, and even pleasant, iftaken in small quantities and seldom, but dreadfully pernicious on the whole,and the truly wise avoid them.”

From Minora I have only had one communication since her departure, in which shethanked me for her pleasant visit, and said she was sending me a bottle ofEnglish embrocation to rub on my bruises after skating; that it was wonderfulstuff, and she was sure I would like it; and that it cost two marks, and wouldI send stamps. I pondered long over this. Was it a parting hit, intended asrevenge for our having laughed at her? Was she personally interested in thesale of embrocation? Or was it merely Minora’s idea of a graceful return for myhospitality? As for bruises, nobody who skates decently regards it as abruise-producing exercise, and whenever there were any they were all on Minora;but she did happen to turn round once, I remember, just as I was in the act oftumbling down for the first and only time, and her delight was but thinlyveiled by her excessive solicitude and sympathy. I sent her the stamps,received the bottle, and resolved to let her drop out of my life; I had been agood Samaritan to her at the request of my friend, but the best of Samaritansresents the offer of healing oil for his own use. But why waste a thought onMinora at Easter, the real beginning of the year in defiance of calendars. Shebelongs to the winter that is past, to the darkness that is over, and has nopart or lot in the life I shall lead for the next six months. Oh, I could danceand sing for joy that the spring is here! What a resurrection of beauty thereis in my garden, and of brightest hope in my heart! The whole of this radiantEaster day I have spent out of doors, sitting at first among the windflowersand celandines, and then, later, walking with the babies to the Hirschwald, tosee what the spring had been doing there; and the afternoon was so hot that welay a long time on the turf, blinking up through the leafless branches of thesilver birches at the soft, fat little white clouds floating motionless in theblue. We had tea on the grass in the sun, and when it began to grow late, andthe babies were in bed, and all the little wind-flowers folded up for thenight, I still wandered in the green paths, my heart full of happiestgratitude. It makes one very humble to see oneself surrounded by such a wealthof beauty and perfection anonymouslylavished, and to think of theinfinite meanness of our own grudging charities, and how displeased we are ifthey are not promptly and properly appreciated. I do sincerely trust that thebenediction that is always awaiting me in my garden may by degrees be moredeserved, and that I may grow in grace, and patience, and cheerfulness, justlike the happy flowers I so much love.

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