the neighbourhood by buying guinea-pigs. Another method
is to cut off the head of the plantain and apply lawn-sand. I shall very
likely do that one day when there is nothing in the garden which wants
doing more, and if I happen to feel like it. A part of a summer day you
must work in a London garden, but it is equally true that for another
part of the summer day you must just sit and enjoy it. Otherwise you
sacrifice the end to the means.

"As for that old box tree," said my jobbing Jeremiah, "it never ought to
have been put there at all, right on the edge of a bed. If you take my
advice you will have it out. Of course, if it had been properly trimmed
and looked after, that might have been made into a peacock, but it would
take you years to get it into shape now. You can't grow anything under
it, and it's no good trying."

I am glad the old box tree is not a peacock. It has grown the way it
wanted to grow, and it suits it. It is perfectly true that nothing will
grow under it, and therefore I have not tried to grow anything under it.
I found me a handy man and sent him out to buy me a hundred bricks, what
time I marked out under the box tree a place where one might sit--a
place dry to the feet after the rain. I sent him for red bricks, and he
came back with white, because the red bricks were (a) too expensive, and
(b) too soft. But the white bricks have done very well with some old
bricks mixed in with them, and soon lost their aggressiveness. So
underneath my box tree is an L-shaped pavement of bricks, with room for
a seat and a table.

People look at it and sniff. It is too unusual. Then they go away and
buy bricks. It is astonishing, by the way, how very few bricks there are
in a hundred. What I mean, of course, is what a very small pavement they
make.

I made another seat under the big scarlet thorn, but this is more
ambitious. I got me broken pavement stones--not very easy to get
nowadays--and paved a semicircle. On that I put a semicircular seat with
a back to it. Irreverent people have compared it _(a)_ to a pew, and
_(b)_ to a loose-box; but it is a pleasant place to sit in in the
evening, and just catches the last of the sunlight. After that I dealt
firmly with myself, and said that I could not be always making seats.

I began to see ways by which I might make the garden a little less
rectilineal. I need hardly say that I wanted a pergola, because of
course everybody wants a pergola. The best house-agents s