Meanwhile I have been criticising other things. The house is a place of shelter; it is also a place of confinement, and there are corners where the blessed air does not sufficiently circulate. This as an abstraction is generally accepted, but unless you pass a good deal of time out-of-doors you can never know it as a fact. It is not perhaps the happiest result of living in the open air that to the nose thus accustomed there are twice as many smells in the world as there were before. I have been discovering them in various places this morning, here a suggestion of kerosene, there a flavour of cheese, in another spot a reminiscence of Tiglath-Pileser’s pipe. I even pretend to know that it was his meerschaum and not his brier, though Thisbe thinks this preposterous. Thisbe thinks me preposterous altogether, vainly sniffing for the odours which offend me, and begging me to desist from opening windows and letting in the rain. Dumboo, more practical, goes carefully round after me, and closes each in turn as soon as I have left the room, with an air of serious perturbation,--who can be _jewabdeh_--answer-giving--for the acts of a mad mistress? I have finally subsided as near as possible to the window in the breakfast-room, with the garden and the rain outside. It has been given me to understand that I am to have a present shortly, and I may choose my present. For some time I have been vainly revolving the matter; the world seems so full of desirable articles that one does not want; but here an inspiration visits me--I will have another window in the breakfast-room. There is plenty of room for it, nothing but a wall in the way. Where this blank wall, covered with wall-paper, now blocks the vision, another square of garden shall appear; it will let in a line of blue hill, most of the pencil-cedar, a corner of the rose-bushes, and a whole company of poppies and corn-bottles. A carpenter from Jullunder will make it in a week,--Jullunder thrives upon the export of carpenters to the hills,--and it will be a most delicious present, giving a pleasure every morning freshly new, much better than anything that would have to be locked up in a drawer. Also, when we go away I shall be able, without a pang of self-sacrifice, to leave it behind for the enjoyment of other people, which is quite the most pleasing kind of benefit to confer. Very heavily it descends, this first burst of the rains. The garden is bowed under it; from far and near comes the sound of rushing water down the khud-sides. The great valleys beyond the paling are brimful of grey, impenetrable vapour, as if the clouds, even in dissolving, were too heavy to carry themselves. From my asylum nothing appears to stir or speak except the rain. The day weeps fast and stormily, as if night might fall before she had half deplored enough.