Nor would anybody, I am sure, ever think of India and chrysanthemums together. Yet the shelf is glorious with chrysanthemums, purple and bronze and gold and white. My gardening now takes the form of kind attentions to the chrysanthemums. Atma will tie them up with what I can only call swaddling strings, round their necks or their waists or anywhere, without the slightest regard for their comfort. Whereas if there is one thing a chrysanthemum pleads for, it is freedom to exercise its own eccentric discretion with regard to pose. There is no refreshment to exile like the cold sharp fragrance of chrysanthemums, especially white ones. It brings back, straight back, the glistening pavement of Kensington High Street on a wet November night and the dear dense smell of London and a sense of the delight that can be bought for sixpence there. Delight should be cheap but not too cheap. I am thankful sometimes for the limitations of our shelf and the efforts we must make to keep it pretty, and the fact that we have to consider whether leaf-mould is not rather dear at fourpence a basket. It must be difficult to keep in relation with a whole mountain-side, which is the estate of some people, or with six thousand rupees a month, which is the pay of a Member of Council. I should lease most of the mountain-side, I think, and put the rupees in bags and lock them up in a vault, just anyhow, as the rajahs do. To be aware that you had a vault full of rupees in bags would remove every care from life, but not to be obliged to know exactly how many bags there were would fill it with peace and ecstasy. There is solid comfort in a bag of rupees--I have possessed, at times, a little one--but in a vast income which you never see there must be a vague dissatisfaction, as well as bank-books and separate accounts, and cheques and other worries which you must infallibly remember to date. The East teaches us much of simplicity and comfort in the persons of its princes. It has taught me the real magnificence of rupees in a bag.