Atma has a liberal and progressive mind toward the garden; he is always trying to smuggle some new thing into it. In out-of-the-way corners I constantly come upon perfect strangers, well-rooted and entirely at home, and when I ask him by whose order they were admitted, he smiles apologetically and says that without doubt they will be very beautiful, and that his brother gave them to him. He can never tell me the name. “It will be so high,” he shows me with his hand, stooping, “and the flower will be red, simply red it will arrive.” I look at it without enthusiasm, and weakly let it stay. Generally it “arrives” a common little disappointment, but once a great leggy thing turned out an evening primrose, and I knew, before it was too late, that I had been entertaining an angel unawares. “To grow a little catholic,” writes Stevenson, “is the compensation of years.” Dear shade, is it so? In the spiritual outlook, perhaps, in the moral retrospect,--but in matters of taste, in likes and dislikes? You who wrote nothing lightly must have proved this dispensation, poorer spirits can only wish it more general. I remember youth as curious and enterprising, hospitable to everything, and I begin to find the middle years jealously content with what they have. Who, when he has reached the age of all the world, looks with instinctive favour upon anything new? An acquaintance, who may create the common debt of friendship; you are long since heavily involved. An author, who may insist upon intimately engaging your intelligence,--a thing you feel, after a time, to be a liberty in a new-comer. Or even a flower, offering another sentiment to the little store that holds some pain already. Now this godetia. I suppose it argues a depth of ignorance, but until Mr. Johnson recommended it to me in the spring, I had never heard of godetia. Mr. Johnson is the source of seeds and bulbs for Simla, we all go to him; but I, for one, always come away a little ruffled by his habit of referring to everything by its Latin name, and plainly showing that his respect for you depends upon your understanding him. I have wished to preserve Mr. Johnson’s respect, and things have come up afterward that I did not think I had ordered. However, this is by the way. Mr. Johnson assured me that godetia had a fine fleshy flower of variegated colours, would be an abundant bloomer, and with reasonable care should make a good appearance. I planted it with misgivings, and watched its advent with aloofness, I knew I shouldn’t recognize it, and I didn’t. I had never seen it before, I very nearly said so; and at my time of life, with so many old claims pressing, I could not attempt a new affection. And I have taken the present opportunity, when Atma’s back is turned, and pulled it all up. Besides it may have been fleshy, but it wasn’t pretty, and the slugs ate it till its appearance was disgraceful.