It is the very height of the season in the garden. The roses have held several drawing-rooms and practically everybody is here. Sweet-peas flutter up two of the verandah pillars, the rest are dark with honeysuckle and heavy with Maréchal Niels. The pansies are thicker than ever, and a very elegant double wisteria, a lady from Japan, trails her purple skirts over the trellis under which the rickshaws go to their abode. The corn-bottles have come up exactly where I asked them to, scattered thick among the leaves of the chrysanthemums which are already tall and bushy. They are exactly the right blue in exactly the right green and they give a little air, not at all a disagreeable little air, of discernment and sophistication to their corner of the garden. I would like to venture to say that they resemble blue stars in a green sky, if I were sure of offending nobody’s sense of humour. It is natural enough to observe this and pass on, but why should one find a subtle pleasure in the comparison, and linger over it? It must be the same throb of joyful activity with which the evolved human intelligence first detected a likeness between any two of the phenomena about it, and triumphed in the perception, attracted to wisdom and stirred to art. Those indeed were days to live in, when everything was mysteriously to copy and inherit and nothing was exploited, explained, laid bare, when the great sweet thoughts were all to think and heroism had not yet received its molecular analysis, and babies equipped with an instinctive perception of the fundamental weakness of socialistic communism were neither born nor thought of. These seem violent reflections to make in a garden, and they may well be obscured behind the long bed of poppies and field-daisies and more bluets that runs along the side of the house under the windows that support the roses. If you can tell me for what primitive reason poppies and field-daisies and corn-flowers go well together I had rather you didn’t.