People are often removed from their proper social spheres in this world and placed in others which they think lower and generally less worthy of them. Their distant and haughty behaviour under these circumstances is rather, I am afraid, like my own conduct at present, down in the world as I am and reduced to the society of a garden. I, too, have been looking about me with contemptuous indifference, returning no visits, though quantities of things have been coming up to see me, and perpetually referring to the superior circles I moved in when I knew better days and went out to dinner. You may notice, however, that such persons generally end by condescending to the simpler folk they come to live among; it is dull work subsisting upon the most glorious reminiscences and much wiser to become the shining ornament of the more limited sphere to which one may be transferred. That is the course I am considering, for whom cards of invitation are dead letters, and to whom the gay world up here will soon refer I have no doubt, as the late Mrs. Tiglath-Pileser who chose so singularly to bestow her remains in a garden, though I am really alive and flourishing there. I can never be the shining ornament of my garden because nature intended otherwise and there is too much competition, but I may be able to exert an improving influence. It is not impossible, either, that I may find the horticultural class about me more interesting than I find myself. I have been accustomed to speak with quite the ordinary contempt of persons who have “no resources within themselves”--in future I shall have more sympathy and less ridicule for such. I should rather like to know what one is expected to possess in the way of “resources” tucked away in that vague interior which we are asked to believe regularly pigeon-holed and alphabetically classified. We do believe it--by an effort of the imagination--but only try, on a fine day out-of-doors, to rummage there. Your boasted brain is a perfect rag-bag, a waste-paper basket, a bran pie from which you draw at hazard an article value a penny-ha’penny. This is disappointing and humiliating when both you and your family believe that you have only to think in order to be quite indifferent to the world and vastly entertained. “Resources” somehow suggests the things one has read, and I know I depended largely upon certain poets, not one of whom will come near me unless I go personally and bring him from the bookshelves in his covers. Pope for one--why Pope I cannot say, unless because he would blink and cough and be fundamentally miserable in a garden--great breadths of Pope I thought would visit me in quotation. Not a breadth. Immortals of earlier and later periods are equally shy; I catch at their fluttering garments and they are off, leaving a rag in my hand. Only that agreeable conceit of Marvell’s comes and stays, “Annihilating all that’s made To a green thought in a green shade,”