g, and I don't
know what besides, and would rend the air with their shrieks if
condemned to such a life. Sometimes I feel as if I were blest above all
my fellows in being able to find my happiness so easily. I believe I
should always be good if the sun always shone, and could enjoy myself
very well in Siberia on a fine day. And what can life in town offer in
the way of pleasure to equal the delight of any one of the calm evenings
I have had this month sitting alone at the foot of the verandah steps,
with the perfume of young larches all about, and the May moon hanging
low over the beeches, and the beautiful silence made only more profound
in its peace by the croaking of distant frogs and hooting of owls? A
cockchafer darting by close to my ear with a loud hum sends a shiver
through me, partly of pleasure at the reminder of past summers, and
partly of fear lest he should get caught in my hair. The Man of Wrath
says they are pernicious creatures and should be killed. I would rather
get the killing done at the end of the summer and not crush them out of
such a pretty world at the very beginning of all the fun.

This has been quite an eventful afternoon. My eldest baby, born in
April, is five years old, and the youngest, born in June, is three;
so that the discerning will at once be able to guess the age of the
remaining middle or May baby. While I was stooping over a group of
hollyhocks planted on the top of the only thing in the shape of a hill
the garden possesses, the April baby, who had been sitting pensive on a
tree stump close by, got up suddenly and began to run aimlessly about,
shrieking and wringing her hands with every symptom of terror. I stared,
wondering what had come to her; and then I saw that a whole army of
young cows, pasturing in a field next to the garden, had got through the
hedge and were grazing perilously near my tea-roses and most precious
belongings. The nurse and I managed to chase them away, but not before
they had trampled down a border of pinks and lilies in the cruellest
way, and made great holes in a bed of China roses, and even begun to
nibble at a Jackmanni clematis that I am trying to persuade to climb
up a tree trunk. The gloomy gardener happened to be ill in bed, and the
assistant was at vespers--as Lutheran Germany calls afternoon tea or its
equivalent--so the nurse filled up the holes as well as she could with
mould, burying the crushed and mangled roses, cheated for ever of their
hop