Atma and I have had a morning of great anticipations. It is time now to look forward, time to provision the garden against the greedy spring, and to make plans. In all my plans the paling figures largely; it is a hand-rail between us and eternity, naturally things look well against it. Next year we are going to have hollyhocks, single and double, pink and rose and white, in a rampart all along the paling as it follows the sweep of the shelf, and spraying thickly out from these the biggest and whitest marguerites that will consent to come up, and along the border the broad blue ribbon of forget-me-nots. Farther on where the shelf widens in front of the house and the deodars rise thick before it, a creamy Devoniensis is already in possession of the paling, and here my goldenrod is to stand fretted against the firs, and dwarf sunflowers shall fraternize with it; and about its skirts shall grow myriads of coreopsis single and double, and masses of puce-coloured Michaelmas daisies, and at their feet the grateful simple-minded purple petunia in the largest families, as thick as ever she likes. I did not mention it before, because one does hate to be always complaining, but Tiglath-Pileser has invaded the garden with some Japanese plums; straight up they stick in the widest part of the paling border, and discouragingly healthy they look. Round two of these I have planted portulaca and ringed it with lobelia, and round the other two lobelia, and ringed it with little pink lilies. The roses in the bed opposite the dining-room window have grown rather leggy with age, and next year they are to rise out of a thick and, as I see it, low forest of pink and white candytuft, and the bed is to be deeply framed in pansies. We are to have foxgloves on the khud rank above rank, and wallflowers on its more accessible projections, and in the rains the gayest crowd of dahlias of the ballet, the single degenerates, are to gather there. Atma is to get them where he likes and I am to ask no questions. I am homesick for a certain very sweet, very yellow rather small and not very double brier rose that belongs to other years when it was much presented to “the teacher,” also for a modest little fringed pink with a dark line on its petals which made the kind of posy one offered to one’s grandmother. But I fear the other years are a country one cannot rediscover in every part; though I have asked diligently of persons who also inhabited them I have not yet found my gentle pink or my little yellow rose. Then a bed of irises is to be made just over the kitchen roof, to take the eye off it, and the garden lilies, which are mostly madonnas, are to foregather in one place instead of being scattered about as they are now among the rose-bushes. Thisbe thinks nothing could be lovelier than a lily and a rose, but I cannot agree with her. The combination savours of _trop de luxe_, it recalls an early Victorian lacquered tea-tray. If she likes to mix her garden-parties