slink out with a spade and a rake and feverishly dig a little
piece of ground and break it up and sow surreptitious ipomaea,
and run back very hot and guilty into the house, and get into a chair
and behind a book and look languid just in time to save my reputation.
And why not? It is not graceful, and it makes one hot; but it
is a blessed sort of work, and if Eve had had a spade in Paradise
and known what to do with it, we should not have had all that sad
business of the apple.

What a happy woman I am living in a garden, with books,
babies, birds, and flowers, and plenty of leisure to enjoy them!
Yet my town acquaintances look upon it as imprisonment, and burying,
and I don't know what besides, and would rend the air with their shrieks
if condemned to such a life. Sometimes I feel as if I were blest
above all my fellows in being able to find my happiness so easily.
I believe I should always be good if the sun always shone,
and could enjoy myself very well in Siberia on a fine day.
And what can life in town offer in the way of pleasure to equal
the delight of any one of the calm evenings I have had this month
sitting alone at the foot of the verandah steps, with the perfume
of young larches all about, and the May moon hanging low over
the beeches, and the beautiful silence made only more profound
in its peace by the croaking of distant frogs and hooting of owls?
A cockchafer darting by close to my ear with a loud hum sends a shiver
through me, partly of pleasure at the reminder of past summers,
and partly of fear lest he should get caught in my hair.
The Man of Wrath says they are pernicious creatures and should be killed.
I would rather get the killing done at the end of the summer
and not crush them out of such a pretty world at the very beginning
of all the fun.