I have clumps and clumps of hollyhocks, and a balustrade of them, pink and white ones, on each side of the steps that run down from the verandah in front of the drawing-room door. It is an unsophisticated thing, the single hollyhock, like a bashful school child in a sun-bonnet. Do what you will you cannot make it feel at home among the beaux and belles of high life in the garden; it never looks really happy except just inside a cottage paling with a bunch of rhubarb on one side and a tangle of “old man” on the other. Still it is a good and grateful flower in whatever station it pleases the sun to call it. It gets along on the merest necessities of life when times are bad and water scarce, and flowers, with anything like a chance, twice in the season. One cannot, after all, encourage class feeling in the garden; there every one must stand on his own roots, and take his share of salts and carbon dioxide without precedence, and the hollyhocks in my garden receive as much consideration as anybody. Petunias are up all over the place, purple and white and striped. I knew by experience that we could have too many petunias on this shelf, so whenever a vague, young pushing thing disclosed itself to be a petunia, as it nearly always did, I requested Atma to pull it up. Nevertheless they survive surprisingly everywhere, looking out among the feet of the roses, flaunting over the forget-me-nots, unexpected in a box of seedling asters. Now if I were going to recognize social distinctions in the garden, which I am not, I should call the good petunia a person unmistakably middle-class. Whether it is this incapacity of hers to see a snub, or her very full skirt, or her very high colour, the petunia always seems to me a bourgeoise little lady in her Sunday best, with her hair smooth and her temper well kept under for the occasion. I think she leads her family a nagging life, and goes to church regularly. One should always mass them; a single petunia here and there among the community of flowers is more desolate and ineffective than most maiden ladies. Rather late this spring we discovered a corner of the bed in front of the dining-room window to be quite empty, and what to put in we couldn’t think, and were considering, when Atma told us that he knew of a thousand petunias homeless and roaming the shelf. I quite believed him, and bade him gather them in, with such a resultant blaze of purple as I shall never in future be without. The border just beyond them is simply shouting with yellow coreopsis, and behind that rise the dark branches of the firs on the khud-side, and between these, very often in broken pictures sharp against the blue, the jagged points and peaks of the far snows. All this every morning the person has with her eggs and bacon who sits opposite the dining-room window. I am glad to say that the other members of my family object to the glare.