“My dear,” I cry, “you shouldn't say that about Mr. Blackmore: you seem to forget that his second name was Doddridge, and I think he was fully justified in refusing to change the attractive name of his heroine of the South Downs because it happened to catch the ears (and the pence) of people interested in the French provinces which were pinched by the Germans, who added insult to injury by transforming Alsace-Lorraine to Elsass-Lothringen. And so far as my own conscience is concerned----” “Your own what?” cried Dorothy. “My own conscience--_literary_ conscience, of course.” “Oh, that one? Well?” “I say, that so far as--as--as I am concerned, I would not have shrunk from calling a book _A Garden in Tipperary_ if I had written it a few years ago when all England and a third of France were ringing with the name Tipperary. “Only then it would have been a Garden of War, but now it suits you--your fancy, to make it a Garden of Peace.” “It's not too late yet; if you go on like this, I think I could manage to introduce a note of warfare into it and to make people see the appropriateness of it as well; so don't provoke me.” “I will not,” said Dorothy, with one of her perplexing smiles. And then she became interesting; for she was ready to affirm that every garden is a battlefield, even when it is not run by a husband and his wife--a dual system which led to the most notorious horticultural fiasco on record. War, according to Milton, originated in heaven, but it has been carried on with great energy ever since on earth, and the first garden of which there is a literary record maintained the heavenly tradition. So does the last, which has brought forth fruit and flowers in abundance through the slaughter of slugs, the crushing of snails, the immolation of leather-jackets, the annihilation of 'earwigs, and is now to be alluded to as a Garden of Peace, if you please.