flower-baskets, like huge bouquets, announce the gay arrival of spring.'
I looked up and out through my hillside window. The black ridge on the
other side of the valley stood a grim wall of burnt heather against the
sky--which sky, like the bullets in the nursery rhyme, was made
unmistakably of lead; a close rain was falling methodically, and,
generally speaking, the world looked like a soaked mackintosh. It wasn't
much like the gay arrival of spring, and grimly I mused on the
advantages of life in town.

Certainly, it did seem hard, I reflected, that town should be ahead of
us even in such a country matter as spring. Flower-baskets indeed! Why,
we haven't as much as a daisy for miles around. It is true that on the
terrace there the crocuses blaze like a street on fire, that the
primroses thicken into clumps, lying among their green leaves like
pounds of country butter; it is true that the blue cones of the little
grape hyacinth are there, quaintly formal as a child's toy-flowers; yes!
and the big Dutch hyacinths are already shamelessly _enceinte_ with
their buxom waxen blooms, so fat and fragrant--(one is already delivered
of a fine blossom. Well, that is a fine baby, to be sure! say the other
hyacinths, with babes no less bonny under their own green aprons--all
waiting for the doctor sun). Then among the blue-green blades of the
narcissus, here and there you see a stem topped with a creamish
chrysalis-like envelope, from which will soon emerge a beautiful eye,
rayed round with white wings, looking as though it were meant to fly,
but remaining rooted--a butterfly on a stalk; while all the beds are
crowded with indeterminate beak and blade, pushing and elbowing each
other for a look at the sun, which, however, sulkily declines to look at
them. It is true there is spring on the terrace, but even so it is
spring imported from the town--spring bought in Holborn, spring
delivered free by parcel post; for where would the terrace have been but