We will take the work of the third day, for its range is at once lower and wider than that of the others: Can you do nothing in that kind? Is there no garden near you where you can get from some generous person leave to weed the beds, or sweep up the dead leaves? (I once allowed an eager little girl of ten years old to weed my garden; and now, though it is long ago, she always speaks as if the favour had been done to her, and not to the garden and me.) Is there no dusty place that you can water?—if it be only the road before your door, the traveller will thank you. No roadside ditch that you can clean of its clogged rubbish, to let the water run clear? No scattered heap of brickbats that you can make an ordinary pile of? You are ashamed? Yes; that false shame is the Devil’s pet weapon. He does more work with it even than with false pride. For with false pride, he only goads evil; but with false shame, paralyzes good. But you have no ground of your own; you are a girl, and can’t work on other people’s? At least you have a window of your own, or one in which you have a part interest. With very little help from the carpenter, you can arrange a safe box outside of it, that will hold earth enough to root something in. If you have any favour from Fortune at all, you can train a rose, or a honeysuckle, or a convolvulus, or a nasturtium, round your window—a quiet branch of ivy—or if for the sake of its leaves only, a tendril or two of vine. Only, be sure all your plant-pets are kept well outside of the window. Don’t come to having pots in the room, unless you are sick. I got a nice letter from a young girl, not long since, asking why I had said in my answers to former questions that young ladies were “to have nothing to do with greenhouses, still less with hothouses.” The new inquirer has been sent me by Fors, just when it was time to explain what I meant. First, then—The primal object of your gardening, for yourself, is to keep you at work in the open air, whenever it is possible. The greenhouse will always be a refuge to you from the wind; which, on the contrary, you ought to be able to bear; and will tempt you into clippings and pottings and pettings, and mere standing dilettantism in a damp and over-scented room, instead of true labour in fresh air. Secondly.—It will not only itself involve unnecessary expense—(for the greenhouse is sure to turn into a hothouse in the end; and even if not, is always having its panes broken, or its blinds going wrong, or its stands getting rickety); but it will tempt you into buying nursery plants, and waste your time in anxiety about them.