My garden would make you chortle with glee. You will have to take it by degrees, as I do. I have a sort of bowing acquaintance with it myself--en masse, so to speak. I hardly know a thing in it by name. I have wall fruit on the south side and an orchard of plum, pear, and cherry trees on the north side. The east side is half lawn and half disorderly flower beds. I am going to let the tangle in the orchard grow at its own sweet will--that is, I am going to as far as Amelie allows me. I never admire some trailing, flowering thing there that, while I am admiring it, Amelie does not come out and pull it out of the ground, declaring it une salete and sure to poison the whole place if allowed to grow. Yet some of these same saletes are so pretty and grow so easily that I am tempted not to care. One of these trials of my life is what I am learning to know as liserone--we used to call it wild morning-glory. That I am forbidden to have--if I want anything else. But it is pretty. I remember years ago to have heard Ysolet, in a lecture at the Sorbonne, state that the "struggle for life" among the plants was fiercer and more tragic than that among human beings. It was mere words to me then. In the short three weeks that I have been out here in my hilltop garden I have learned to know how true that was. Sometimes I am tempted to have a garden of weeds. I suppose my neighbors would object if I let them all go to seed and sow these sins of agriculture all over the tidy farms about me. Often these lovely mornings I take a long walk with the dog before breakfast. He is an Airedale, and I am terribly proud of him and my neighbors terribly afraid of him. I am half inclined to believe that he is as afraid of them as they are of him, but I keep that suspicion, for prudential reasons, to myself. At any rate, all passers keep at a respectful distance from me and him. Our usual walk is down the hill to the north, toward the shady route that leads by the edge of the canal to Meaux. We go along the fields, down the long hill until we strike into a footpath which leads through the woods to the road called "Paves du Roi" and on to the canal, from which a walk of five minutes takes us to the Marne. After we cross the road at the foot of the hill there is not a house, and the country is so pretty--undulating ground, in every tint of green and yellow. From the high bridge that crosses the canal the picture is--well, is French-canally, and you know what that means--green-banked, tree-shaded, with a towpath bordering the straight line of water, and here and there a row of broad long canal-boats moving slowly through the shadows.