If you choose to live on the top of one of the Himalayas there are some things you must particularly pay for. One of them is earth. Your mountain, if it is to be depended upon, is mostly made of rock and I have already mentioned how radically it slopes. So a garden is not at all a thing to be taken for granted. Sometimes you have a garden and sometimes only a shaly ledge, or you may have a garden to-day which to-morrow has slid down the hill and superimposed itself upon your neighbour below. That occurs in the rains; it is called a “slip.” It has never been our experience because the shelf is fairly flat; but it has happened to plenty of people. I suppose such a garden is recoverable, if you are willing to take the trouble, but it could never be quite the same thing. The most permanent plot, however, requires all kinds of attention, and one of the difficulties is to keep it up to its own level. Queer sinkings and fallings away are always taking place in the borders. Atma professes to find them quite reasonable; he says the flowers eat the earth and of course it disappears. The more scientific explanation appears to me to be that the gnomes of the mountain who live inside, have been effecting repairs, and naturally the top falls in. It may be said that gnomes are not as a rule so provident; but very little has yet been established about the Himalayan kind; they might be anything; they probably are. This whole morning Atma and I have been patching the garden. At home when you buy a piece of land you expect that enough earth will go with it for ordinary purposes, but here you buy the land first and the earth afterwards, as you want it, in basketfuls. There is plenty in the jungle, beautiful leaf-mould, but it is against the law to collect it there for various reasons, all of them excellent and tiresome; you must buy it instead from the Town Council, and it costs fourpence a basket. Tiglath-Pileser says it is the smallest investment in land he ever heard of, but it takes a great many baskets, and when the bill comes in I shall be glad to know if he is still of that opinion. Meanwhile coolie after coolie dumps his load and I have heard of no process that more literally improves the property. You will imagine whether, when anything is pulled up, we do not shake the roots.