If we are prepared to set aside our preconceived ideas as to what a garden ought to be, we must own that the children are not far wrong after all. A garden is only a world in miniature, with prairies of flowers and forests of roses and gravel paths for the wide, dusty roads. When we plant flowers in our garden it is as though we added new territories to our empire, new reds and blues and purples to our treasury of colours. And so when a child has wrought a fine morning’s havoc in its little patch of ground it has added it may be an ocean, it may be only a couple of stars to the kingdom of imagination which we may no longer see. It only needs a sunny hour or two, a trowel, and a pair of dirty hands to change a few square yards of earth into a world. And the child may be considered fortunate in being able to express itself perfectly in terms of dust. Our books and pictures cumber the earth, our palaces strike the skies, and yet it is our common tragedy that we have not found expression; while down the garden behind the lilac-bushes at this very moment Milton may have developed Lycidas into a sticky marsh, and Shakespeare may have compressed Hamlet into a mud-pie. The works of the children end as they begin in dust; but we cannot pretend that ours are more permanent. A DISTINGUISHED GUEST I AM willing to acknowledge that until lately, when I was privileged to entertain a cat under my roof for a fortnight, my knowledge of these noble beings was only academic. I had read what the poets have to say about them—Wordsworth and Swinburne, Cowper and Gray; I knew that “cat” was the only word in the English language that had a vocative, “puss”; I knew that Southey mourned that his kitten should ever attain to cathood, that the Egyptians were very fond of cats and that Lord Roberts is not. Then I had seen cats in the street, and admired the spirit with which a homeless cat with no visible means of subsistence would put shame into the heart of a well-fed terrier. Lying awake by night I had heard their barbaric song ringing like a challenge in the ears of civilisation, and had wondered whether some unknown Strauss might not revolutionise the music of the future by aid of their passionate harmonies. But I had never moved in their society, and therefore I would not understand them. In those days I should probably have thought that the recent message of the Postmaster-General to the Press, to the effect that cats of the old General Post Office had been found comfortable homes, was trivial. And I remember with shame that I watched the malevolent antics of the caricature of a cat that appears in the “Blue Bird” without indignation.