I do not care what Mr. Asquith has done wrong; what Mr. Joseph Chamberlain did wrong; what King George the Third and all the Georges have done or failed to do: I trust this people as I trust no other. Guilty of sins and blunders they may be and are, but the blunder is followed by the honest effort to find again and do the right; you come down always to a groundwork of character, sincerity, integrity. England has been in a way the conscience of the world. What other race-name is a word to conjure with? All over the earth where confusion comes, it is whispered: "The troubles are dying down; the English are drawing near." And in the councils of the world, her voice has been the great arbiter of right and wrong. No one here now can doubt that England is going through that great anguish wherein the soul of a people is re-born. The unity, the calm, the quickening determination are part of a great spring-time that will lead, God grant, to harvest days of peace. There is slow knitting up of the sinews of war; more and more her sons respond to the call which still leaves them free to choose; old England is getting ready as ever, resolved, incredulous of defeat; the spring knows it; the rooks know it, busy in their elm tree parliament. The great sorrow and the great endeavour have turned the very soil of the country into holy ground. Among my bonfires of spring,--for I like to keep that old, religious rite of purification,--I burned half a dozen volumes of recent English fiction, decadent, erotic; a volume or two of flippant and sensational criticism; and one of affected futurist poetry, or some brand like unto it. They belong to the England whose follies and foibles are being burned in a great fire of affliction; they are not worthy of this great England that is emerging from the flame. As I write, the tinkle of the English sheep bells from afar comes like the very sound of peace. February, with the vanishing of the icicles, brought snowdrops and crocuses. All kinds of growing things of which I had not dreamed came peeping up in this old garden: crocuses, purple and gold, grow in a little clump where the wind just fails to reach them; royal daffodils nod and sway, or stand erect and golden, those from new planting outshining the rest. In March the violets were out, and primroses followed; the pony's meadow is full of them, deep in the grass; and these are only a part of the lovely procession of flowers,--bluebells, anemones, and unnumbered others.