and I am ashamed to look it in the face--I have positively worked it to death. Apply within for lofty sentiments or profound conclusions, the result is the same: these things fly the ardent seeker and only appear when you are not looking for them. Instead you find shreds of likes and dislikes, the ghost of an opinion you held last week, a desire to know what time it is. My regrettable experience is that you can explore the recesses of your soul out-of-doors in much less than a week if you put your mind to it, with surprise and indignation that you should find so little there. “You beat your pate and fancy wit will come; Knock as you please, there’s nobody at home.” Dear me, there’s Mr. Pope, and very much, as usual, to the point! No, resources are things you can lay your hands upon, and I have come to believe that they are all in the house. Everything is up and showing, the garden is green with promise, but very few things are quite ready for my kind advances; very few things are out. What a pretty idea, by the way, in that common little word as the flowers use it! Out of the damp earth and the green sheath, out into the sun with the others, out to meet the bees and to snub the beetles,--oh, _out_! When young girls emerge into the world they too are “out”--the word was borrowed, of course, from the garden; its propriety is plain. Thisbe, I remember, is out this season; but I do not see anything in the borders exactly like Thisbe. Doubtless later on her prototype will come, in June I think, unfolding a pink petal-coat. There is no hurry; it is yet only the second week in April and these grey mountains are still delicate and dim under the ideal touch of the wild apricot and plum. The borders may be empty, but there is sweet vision to be had by looking up, and just a hint of nature’s possible purposes with a khud. It now occurs to me that there ought to be clouds and clouds of this pink and white blossoming all about the house, behind as well as before, on each of our several declivities,--there ought to be and there is not. I remember now why there is not. One crisp morning last autumn Tiglath-Pileser, who is a practical person, was struck by the fact, though it is not a new one, that wild fruit trees may be made to cultivate fruit by the process of grafting, and announced his intention to graft largely. “Think,” said he, “of the satisfaction of being able to write home to England that you are gathering from your own trees quantities of the greengages which they pay tenpence a pound for and place carefully in tarts!”