The dust haze from the plains hangs all about us, obscuring even the near ranges, impalpable but curiously solid. It has a flavour which it is impossible not to taste if ever one breathes through the mouth, and hour by hour it silently gathers upon the furniture. It has been like this for a week, pressing round us at a measured distance, which just enables us to see our own houses and gardens. Within that space, the sunlight and every circumstance as usual. It is a little like living under a ground-glass bell. Do not choose the present time of year to come to see Simla. You would have to make a house-to-house visitation, and piece it together from memory. Even here, in the garden, much too hot the eye of heaven shines. I have abandoned the pencil-cedar, and taken refuge under a trellis covered with a banksia rose, which is thicker, and I have added to my defences a pith hat and an umbrella. Notwithstanding these precautions, we all gasp together to-day in the garden; and I am inclined to agree with the mignonette, which is not as a rule talkative, that this is no longer the summer--exquisite word--that we expect in Simla, but the odious “hot weather” which comes instead in the country down below. The mignonette, by the way, stands to my discernment, immediately under the pencil-cedar. When I sowed it there in the spring, Tiglath-Pileser said, “It will never do anything under a conifer.” When it began to show, he said again, “It may come up, but it will never do anything. Nothing ever does anything under a conifer.” Atma was not of this advice. “Come up?” he said, looking at it sternly, “wherefore should it not come up, if your honour wishes it?” Atma always takes this view; he seems to suppose that the flowers, like himself, are above all things anxious to please, and if any of them fail in their duty, he implies, with indignation, that he will know the reason why. But his opinion is too constant, and I did not trust it about the mignonette. I insisted, instead, that every morning the fallen cedar spines should be picked out of it, and the earth freshly stirred about the roots; and I have a better patch of mignonette under my conifer than can be produced anywhere else in the garden. I am sure that the shade of a conifer is no less beneficial than any other kind of shade, except that there is never enough of it; nor can I accept the theory that there is anything poisonous in the spines. They only pack and only lie very closely together, never blown about like leaves, and so keep away the air and light, and if you happen to have the use of twenty or thirty brown fingers to pick them out, there is no reason why you cannot produce quantities of things beside mignonette under a conifer. Do anything? I do not know a more able-bodied or hard-working flower on the shelf. A thing like that offers one for some time afterwards a valuable handle in arguments.