I WANT a word - a friendly, confidential word - with garden-loving folk who are sensitive to external surroundings, and influenced by every passing variation in the weather. There is no play on the face of Nature, however slight, which they do not observe. If their august mistress smiles they are elated, if she frowns they are sad. Human beings who are constituted like this are affected by a hundred things which the mass never so much as sees. They comprise some of the finest spirits of the nation. Kind, tender-hearted, with souls tuned to an abhorrence of what is cruel and wrong, they feel the rough, jagged edges of the world acutely.

People of this class sometimes tell me that the autumn oppresses them. They cannot enjoy their gardens when vegetation is decaying. They cannot find pleasure in country walks when the leaves are coming down and the fields are swathed in mist. They complain of lowered health, too: an intermittent heartbeat, the dull gnawing of neuritis. They actually speak, at the absurdly youthful age of sixty-five, of growing old!

Perhaps there are some among my readers who are constituted similarly to these poor sensitive souls. Will they forgive me if I say that I fully sympathise with and comprehend them? And will they let me assure them that if they try and understand the garden as I try to understand them, it will do wonders for them? Of course the intermittent heart-beat at sixty-five is a factor that has to be considered, but I protest against the morbidity that prompts a man to lie awake o' nights ringing the changes on 1, 2, 3, o, o, 4, 5, and 1, 0, 0, 2, 0, 3, 4, 5, when he has such a delicious problem to solve as the selection of his Tulips for next spring's flowering. To think, too, of a person worrying over neuritis when he can buy a beautiful, illustrated book of shrubs for a shilling, and plan new beds for autumn making! Personally, when I have neurotic pangs I employ a muscular masseur to knead me, and while he is thus engaged (getting very hot, I observe, in his consuming earnestness), I placidly peruse the descriptions in the new Rose catalogues, and I think what admirable writers there are among those who draw up nurserymen's catalogues. How they would excel as novelists, with their wonderful powers of description, gifts of imagination, and knowledge of humanity!

What I particularly want to say to the sensitive soul is this: Where lies the justification for depression when you know quite well that Nature works in a never-ceasing round? Who can feel grieved at the fall of the leaf when he learns that clever device which the twig has of ripening and hardening under the stalk, and sees that the same mellowing process which squeezes the leaf off swells up the apparently lifeless buds that are to give foliage and blossom next year? As well mourn over the moulting of a fowl. While the stems of your herbaceous plants, and of your Raspberries, are dying, the crowns on the rootstocks below are thickening. As the Gladiolus foliage withers above ground a new corm superimposes itself on the old one below. You take Apples and Pears from the trees, but you leave on them, as a result of your skilled pruning, wonderful storehouses in the form of buds that are packed with leaves, stems, blossoms, and fruit, all to come forth in their season.

There is no such thing as a dreary countryside or a depressing garden. These evil visions are the offspring of ill-balanced, untrained minds. One of the most lovely and satisfying things in nature is an expanse of down-land on the heart of a winter night, seen in shadow-glimpses as the clouds race each other past the moon. And the happiest moments of happy lives are those spent in clearing vegetable debris from fading beds, and turning the rich brown earth in readiness for the bulbs and plants which are to welcome the spring.

October and November are splendid garden characters. They want understanding, but they 'are worth studying. Do we feel the most interested in those of our acquaintances who are the most elementary and obvious? I think not. If their beauty is only "skin-deep," they tend to bore us after a time. There are no depths to be probed, no elusive clues to be followed up, no difficulties of comprehension to stimulate us. In autumn we have it given to us to touch the bedrock of gardening success. We can take such portion of mother Earth as is under our influence, and by the exercise of our own personal handiwork double its productiveness. Is not that a great thought? Does it not fill us with inward stirrings, with ardent resolves? Does not the very reflection give us grit and backbone? And do we not feel that we see all life in a new light? The simple philosophy of the garden widens all our outlook, gives us new hopes, new interests, and new knowledge.