I have consented to this. I have been wrought upon certainly, but I have consented. For all that, it is not so simple as it looks. It is my occupation to write out with care and patience the trifles the world shows me, revolving as it does upon its axis before every intelligent eye; and I cannot be divorced from all that is upholstered and from my dear occupation by the same decree. And how, I ask you, how observe life from a cane chair under a tree in a garden! There is the beautiful pure fresh air certainly, and there are the things coming up. But what, tell me, can you extract from air beside water; and though a purely vegetable romance would be a novelty, could I get it published? Tiglath-Pileser has contributed to my difficulty a book of reference, a volume upon the coleoptera of the neighbourhood, and I am to take care of it. I am taking the greatest care of it, but I do not like to hand it back to him with the sentiments I feel in case one fine day I should be reduced to coleoptera and thankful to get them. Nevertheless I have no choice, I cannot go forth in the world’s ways and see what people are doing there, I must just sit under my tree and think and consider upon the current facts of a garden, the bursting buds I suppose and the following flowers, the people who happen that way and the ideas the wind brings; the changes of the seasons--there’s fashion after all in that--the behaviour of the ants and earwigs; oh, I am encouraged, in the end it will be a novel of manners! Besides, there ought to be certain virtues, if one could find them, in _plein air_, for scribbling as well as for painting. One’s head always feels particularly empty in a garden, but that is no reason why one should not see what is going on there, and if one’s impressions are a trifle incoherent--the wind does blow the leaves about--they will be on that account all the more impressionistic.