evour the large white lilies, and honeysuckles; finally, they spread
themselves impartially all over the garden, and having literally
stripped that bare, are now attacking the fruit. It is an insect which I
have never seen in England; a species of beetle, much smaller, but not
unlike the cockchafer we are familiar with. Their number is really
prodigious, and they seem to me to propagate with portentous rapidity,
for every day, in spite of the sweeping made by the gardener and myself,
they appear as thick as ever. But for the dread of their coming in still
greater force next year, if we do not continue our work of
extermination, I should almost be tempted to give it up in despair.

I have a few flower-beds that I have had made, and keep under my own
especial care; also some pretty baskets, which I have had expressly
manufactured with exceeding difficulty; these, filled with earth, and
planted with roses, I have placed on the stumps of some large trees,
which were cut down last spring and form nice rustic pedestals; and thus
I contrive to produce something of an English garden effect. But the
climate is against me. The winter is so terribly cold that nothing at
all delicate can stand it unless cased up in straw-matting and manure.
We have, therefore, no evergreen shrubs, such as the lauristinus, and
Portugal and variegated laurels, which form our English garden
shrubberies; nor do they seem to replace these by the native growth of
their own woods, the kalmias and rhododendrons, but principally by hardy
evergreens of the fir and pine species, which are native and abundant
here. Then, with scarcely any interval of spring to moderate the sudden
extreme change, the winter becomes summer--summer, without its screen of
thick leaves to shelter one from the blazing, scorching heat. Everything
starts into bloom, as it were, at once; and, instead of lasting even
their proverbially short date of beauty, the flowers vanish as suddenly
as they appeared, under the fierce influence of the heat and the
devastations of the swarming insects it engenders.

To make up for this, I have here almost an avenue of fine lemon-trees,
in cases; humming-birds, which are a marvel and enchantment to me; and
fire-flies, which are exquisite in the summer evenings.

I have, too, a fine hive of bees, which has produced already this spring
two strong young swarms, whose departure from the parent hive formed a
very interesting event in my novel experiences;