nside,
and there you are discovered sitting on your sofa and looking for all
the world as though you had been expecting visitors for hours.

"Pray, does he wear pyjamas?" I inquired.

But she had never heard of pyjamas.

It takes a long time to make my spring lists. I want to have a border
all yellow, every shade of yellow from fieriest orange to nearly white,
and the amount of work and studying of gardening books it costs me will
only be appreciated by beginners like myself. I have been weeks planning
it, and it is not nearly finished. I want it to be a succession of
glories from May till the frosts, and the chief feature is to be the
number of "ardent marigolds"--flowers that I very tenderly love--and
nasturtiums. The nasturtiums are to be of every sort and shade, and are
to climb and creep and grow in bushes, and show their lovely flowers
and leaves to the best advantage. Then there are to be eschscholtzias,
dahlias, sunflowers, zinnias, scabiosa, portulaca, yellow violas, yellow
stocks, yellow sweet-peas, yellow lupins--everything that is yellow or
that has a yellow variety. The place I have chosen for it is a long,
wide border in the sun, at the foot of a grassy slope crowned with
lilacs and pines, and facing southeast. You go through a little pine
wood, and, turning a corner, are to come suddenly upon this bit of
captured morning glory. I want it to be blinding in its brightness after
the dark, cool path through the wood.

That is the idea. Depression seizes me when I reflect upon the probable
difference between the idea and its realisation. I am ignorant, and
the gardener is, I do believe, still more so; for he was forcing some
tulips, and they have all shrivelled up and died, and he says he cannot
imagine why. Besides, he is in love with the cook, and is going to marry
her after Christmas, and refuses to enter into any of my plans with the
enthusiasm they deserve, but sits with vacant eye dreamily chopping
wood from morning till night to keep the beloved one's kitchen fire well
supplied. I cannot understand any one preferring cooks to marigolds;
those future marigolds, shadowy as they are, and whose seeds are still
sleeping at the seedsman's, have shone through my winter days like
golden lamps.

I wish with all my heart I were a man, for of course the first thing I
should do would be to buy a spade and go and garden, and then I should
have the delight of doing everything for my flowers with my own hands
an