“Stronger than it ever was. I will hear the voice of no protestant against it,” I replied. My scheme had become apparent to her in almost every particular as it had flashed upon me; and we began operations the very next day. And this is what the operation amounted to--an Amputation. When a limb has suffered such an injury as to make its recovery hopeless as well as a danger to the whole body, the saving grace of the surgeon's knife is resorted to, and the result is usually the rescue of the patient. Our resolution was to cut away the rotten parts of the roof of the greenhouse and convert the remainder, which was perfectly sound, into a peach-shelter; and within a couple of weeks the operation had been performed with what appeared to us to be complete success. We removed the lower panes of glass without difficulty--the difficulty _was_ to induce the others to remain under their bondage of ancient putty: “They don't make putty like that nowadays,” remarked my builder, who is also, in accordance with the dictation of a job like this, a housebreaker, a carpenter, and a glazier--a sort of unity of many tools that comes to our relief (very appropriately) from the United States. [Illustration: 0340] I replied to him enigmatically that putty was a very good servant, but a very bad master. The dictum had no connection with the matter in hand, but it sounded as if it had, and that it was the crystallisation of wisdom; and the good workman accepted it at its face value. He removed over two hundred panes, each four feet by ten inches, without breaking one, and he removed more than a thousand feet of the two-inch laths from the stages, the heavier ones being of oak; he braced up the seven foot depth of roof which we decreed should shelter our peaches, and “made good” the inequalities of the edges. In short, he made a thoroughly good job of the affair, and when he had finished he left us with a new and very interesting feature of the garden. A lean-to greenhouse is, as a rule, a commonplace incident in a garden landscape, and it is doubtful if it pays for its keep, though admittedly useful as a nursery; but a peach-alley is interesting because unusual. In our place of peace this element is emphasised through our having allowed the elevated, brick-built border that existed before, to remain untouched, and also the framework where the swing-glass ventilators had been hung. When our peach-trees were planted, flanked by plums and faced by apples _en espalier,_ we covered the borders with violas of various colours, and enwreathed the framework with the Cape Plumbago and the Jasmine Solanum. and both responded nobly to our demands.