The proceeding had not my approval. It seemed to me that it would be a good deal of trouble and care and thought and anxiety to grow greengages on a khud, and we had none of these things to spare. Neither would there be any satisfaction in gathering quantities of them when one could buy a convenient number in the bazaar. We could not eat them all, and it was not our walk in life to sell such things; we might certainly expect to be cheated. We should be reduced to making indiscriminate presents of them and receiving grateful notes from people we probably couldn’t bear. Or possibly I, like the enterprising heroine of improving modern fiction, would feel compelled to start a jam factory, and did I strike him, Tiglath-Pileser, as a person to bring a jam factory to a successful issue? At the moment, I remember, an accumulation of greengages seemed the one thing I precisely couldn’t and wouldn’t tolerate, but I didn’t say very much, hardly more than I have mentioned, as the supreme argument failed to occur to me at the time. The supreme argument, which only visits you after watching the pink and white petals drop among the deodars for hours together, is, of course, that if you can afford to grow fruit to look at it is utilitarian folly to turn it into fruit to eat. So I have no doubt he had his way.... I have been to see; it is the case. Where there should be masses of delicate bloom there are stumps, bare attenuated stumps, tied up in poultices with fingers sticking out of them, which I suppose are the precious grafts. Well, the devil enters into each of us in his own guise; I shall warn Tiglath-Pileser particularly to beware of him in the form of a market gardener.