Rabbits, again, are dear things, with an appeal that is quite different from that of any other of the wild things. Sometimes in the past, when I have been doomed to sit for an hour or so in the airlessness and weariness of crowded hall or place of entertainment, or in the loneliness of a congested social function, where everybody is too buzzingly busy with “being social” to have time to say a word to anyone, I just switch my mind right off the glare and the heat and the stuffiness and the superficiality and the heartlessness, and take a look at the little orchard adjoining the cottage garden, and for just a minute I watch the rabbits, nibbling the grass, sitting up on their hind legs to get a better view of any possible enemy-approach, and scampering back to cover in the coppice with a bobbing of white tails, at the least suspicion of danger. To a woman there is something very touching about the timidity of these little brown things. I always wish I could make them understand that I am their friend and not their enemy—but this is a difficult matter, because there is the small white dog to be considered in the compact, and there is no sentimentality about him where rabbits are concerned! I wouldn’t be without these little furry families in the coppice, but oh, I do wish they would leave the young cabbages alone, or at any rate spare the tenderest of the green leaves! It is a bit damping even to ardour like ours to be greeted, when we arrive from town, by a gardener waving a deprecating hand over rows of hardy cabbage stumps bereft of leaves. At such times it seems as though it wouldn’t have been nearly so bad if they had eaten the stems and left us the leaves, at least we could have cooked them, whereas now——! Rabbits certainly emphasize the fact that life grows thistles as well as figs. * * * * * With regard to the beans, it is difficult to be philosophical. I can be to some extent resigned when my misfortunes are handed out to me by Nature, but it is a different thing when they are manufactured for me (at my expense, too) by my fellow-creatures. On the whole, I cannot speak too highly of the men who have worked for me about the Flower-patch; I have been exceedingly well served, but now and again one comes upon misfortune, and on one occasion I found I had engaged an Ananias of the most proficient type. During his brief _régime_ the weeds thrived apace, while the choicest bulbs and flowers took on a world of diskerridgement. When the black pansies, and the heliotrope Spanish iris feathered with white and yellow, and the rare delphiniums, and the yellow arum lily disappeared at one fell swoop, Ananias shook his head sadly and put their defalcation down to the rush of the rain and the angle of the earth. “Everything do simply run off this soil!” he explained. Quite true; it certainly did. And two legs invariably ran with it.