"
She drew it in again. "It is a pretty custom," she said with a sigh;
and pensively inscribed it in her book.
January 15th.--The bills for my roses and bulbs and other last year's
horticultural indulgences were all on the table when I came down to breakfast
this morning. They rather frightened me. Gardening is expensive, I find,
when it has to be paid for out of one's own private pin-money. The Man of
Wrath does not in the least want roses, or flowering shrubs, or plantations,
or new paths, and therefore, he asks, why should he pay for them?
So he does not and I do, and I have to make up for it by not indulging
all too riotously in new clothes, which is no doubt very chastening.
I certainly prefer buying new rose-trees to new dresses, if I cannot
comfortably have both; and I see a time coming when the passion for my
garden will have taken such a hold on me that I shall not only entirely
cease buying more clothes, but begin to sell those that I already have.
The garden is so big that everything has to be bought wholesale;
and I fear I shall not be able to go on much longer with only one man
and a stork, because the more I plant the more there will be to water
in the inevitable drought, and the watering is a serious consideration
when it means going backwards and forwards all day long to a pump near
the house, with a little water-cart.
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