Tall stocks of tuberose--quite three feet--stand among the rose-bushes in front of the drawing-room windows; but they turn brown almost as fast as they open; next year I will plant them under the eaves for more shelter. A clump of cannas, spikes of flame, waving splendid Italian and African leaves, red-brown and brown-green, with coleas of all colours sitting round their feet, lord it at chosen corners on each side of the drive. Even on a shelf you may have features; it is all a matter of relation. If your scale is only simple enough the most surprising incident is possible; and of this the moral certainly lies in the application of it. Masses of pink and white hydrangeas on this principle make the garden look like a Japanese print; they are so big and blotchy and yet so simply, elegantly effective. They are distributed wherever a tub will improve the shelf-scape; like Diogenes the hydrangea must have its tub. Put him in the ground and at once he grows woody and branchy and leafy, imagining perhaps that he is intended to become a shrub. Thus he can be seen to profit by his limitations--of how many more of us may this be said! The lobelia--a garden should always be provided with plenty of lobelia, to give it hope--is flushing into the thick young leaf with a twinkle here and there to show what it could do if the rain would stop for just ten minutes; and the salvia is presently blue, though sparingly, as is its nature. The fuchsias care nothing for the rain and are full of flounces purple and pink; but nobody takes it quite like the begonias, who sit up unblinking crimson and brick-dust and mother-of-pearl, with their gay yellow hearts in their splendid broad petals, saying plainly “We like this.” And dahlias everywhere, single and double, opening a cheerful eye upon a very wet world. The dahlia took possession of Simla--I have looked it up--the same year the Government of India did, and it has made itself equally at home. It grows profusely not only in our bits of garden but everywhere along the khud-sides that border the public highways. It mixes itself up with Finance and Foreign Relations; it nods under the Telegraph Office and sways about the Military Department. It does as it pleases, no one attempts to govern it; it paints our little mountain town with the colours of fantasy and of freedom.