Our domain therefore is spread out about as much as it would hang from a clothes-line, but the only part we really inhabit is the shelf. All this by way of informing you honestly that the garden in which you are invited to lighten so many long hours for me is no great place. Here and now I abjure invention and idealization; you shall have just what happens, just what there is, and it won’t be much. Pot-luck--you can’t expect more from a garden on a shelf. I must admit that before I was turned out to grow in it myself I thought it well enough, but now I regard it critically, like the other plants. We might do better, all of us, under more favourable conditions. We complain unanimously, for one thing, of the lack of room. Cramped we are to such an extent that I often feel thankful for the paling that runs along the edge and keeps us all in. I suppose nobody ever believed that his lot gave him proper scope for his activities in this world, but I can testify that the wisteria which twines over the paling is pushing a middle-aged hibiscus bush down the khud, while I, sitting here, elbow them both, and a honeysuckle, climbing up from below has to cling with both hands to hold on. If I invite a friend to take a walk in my garden I must go in front declaiming and he must come behind assenting; we cannot waste space on mere paths, and none of them are wide enough for two people to walk abreast, except the main one to the door, which had to be on account of the rickshaws. As it is, pansies, daisies and other small objects constantly slip over the edge and hang there precariously attached by the slenderest root of family affection for days. We are all convinced in this garden, that for expansion one would not choose a shelf, and that applies in quite a ridiculous way to Simla itself, though perhaps it is hardly worth while, out here in the sun, to write an essay to explain exactly how.