I have not mentioned during these spring months the cultivation of the kitchen garden. I leave that entirely to my gardener, only helping throughout the year by looking up in Vilmorin's book (mentioned in January) any special vegetables which are not generally cultivated in England, and noting any deficiency in quantity or quality. No one can expect everything to be equally successful every season, as an unfortunate sowing, a dry fortnight, a late frost, or a cold wind are answerable for a good deal in any garden. It is always some consolation if one finds one's failures are shared by one's neighbours, because then it is more likely to be from some atmospheric cause than from one's own bad cultivation. All the same, the best gardeners have the fewest failures.

We do not sow Sunflowers and many autumn-flowering annuals before the first week in May. For out-of-the-way hardy and half-hardy seeds I find no one is more to be relied on than Mr. Thompson of Ipswich. His packets of seed are not so large nor so expensive as those of some other first-class nurserymen, a great advantage for amateurs. His catalogue is one of the best-simple, concise, and clear, and giving all the information really-wanted, except perhaps by beginners. These, however, are equally depressed and bewildered by every catalogue and every gardening book.

Nothing is so delightful as the first warm days, which come sometimes at the beginning, sometimes later in May. By this time all the March seeds are well up, the whole garden teems with life, and all Nature seems full of joy. The following little poem, which was in a May Pall Mall two years ago, expresses so charmingly the joyous-ness of spring that I copied it out: