for the city seedsman--that magician who sends you strangely spotted
beans and mysterious bulbs in shrivelled cerements, weird little
flower-mummies that suggest centuries of forgotten silence in painted
Egyptian tombs. This strange and shrivelled thing can surely never live
again, we say, as we hold it in our hands, seeing not the glowing
circles of colour, tiny rings of Saturn, packed so carefully inside this
flower-egg, the folds of green and silver silk wound round and round the
precious life within.

But, of course, this is all the seedsman's cunning, and no credit to
Nature; and I repeat, that were it not for railways and the parcel
post--goodness knows whether we should ever get any spring at all in the
country! Think of the days when it had to travel down by stage-coach.
For, left to herself, what is the best Nature can do for you with March
well on the way? Personally, I find the face of the country practically
unchanged. It is, to all intents and purposes, the same as it has been
for the last three or four months--as grim, as unadorned, as bleak, as
draughty, and generally as comfortless as ever. There isn't a flower to
be seen, hardly a bird worth listening to, not a tree that is not
winter-naked, and not a chair to sit down upon. If you want flowers on
your walks you must bring them with you; songs, you must take a poet
under your arm; and if you want to rest, lean laboriously on your
stick--or take your chance of rheumatism.

Of course your specialists, your botanists, your nature-detectives, will
tell you otherwise. They have surprised a violet in the act of
blossoming; after long and excited chase have discovered a clump of
primroses in their wild state; seen one butterfly, heard one cuckoo. But
as one swallow does not make a summer, it takes more than one cuckoo to
make a spring. I confess that only yesterday I saw three sulphur