For the first time, I have this year a rains garden. It is a thing anybody may have, but very few people do. As a rule gardens in our part of the world are handed over in the rains to slugs and their own resources. The resources of a garden, left to itself, are hardly ever suspected. It is impossible, people say, to keep it down, and they sit comfortably in the house looking out upon the impossibility. In the hot weather they say it is impossible to keep it up. They complain that they are here for so short a time that it is not worth while to do anything. Most people are transitory in our little town, certainly; it is generally only a year or two in Paradise and then down again into the Pit, but why that year or two should be thought less worth than others of their lives I never can quite understand. Especially as a flower takes such a little while to come to you. But people are just people. To me of course, peculiarly situated under a conifer, a rains garden was a peremptory necessity, and I have had it in my mind’s eye for months. There was an unavoidable fortnight, when the earlier flowers were going out and the others only answering my invitation as it were, promising to come, which was not quite cheerful. The sweet-peas fluttered for days about the verandah before they would submit to be beaten down, and the roses, those that were left, looked up as if they had been for a long time in ladies’ bonnets. The mignonette grew leggy and curious, spreading in all directions and forgetting to flower, with a smell, moreover, like decaying cabbage, deplorable in mignonette; and the petunias went off with draggled petticoats, which must have been distressing to a flower whose principal virtue is her neat and buxom appearance. The snapdragons and the corn-bottles are just holding on anyhow and the phloxes seem not to know what to do; but the poppies were dashed out in a single night, and quantities of things in pots have been considerately removed by Atma to the back parts, there to meet dissolution in private.