This has been quite an eventful afternoon.
My eldest baby, born in April, is five years old, and the youngest,
born in June, is three; so that the discerning will at once
be able to guess the age of the remaining middle or May baby.
While I was stooping over a group of hollyhocks planted on the top
of the only thing in the shape of a hill the garden possesses,
the April baby, who had been sitting pensive on a tree stump
close by, got up suddenly and began to run aimlessly about,
shrieking and wringing her hands with every symptom of terror.
I stared, wondering what had come to her; and then I saw
that a whole army of young cows, pasturing in a field next
to the garden, had got through the hedge and were grazing
perilously near my tea-roses and most precious belongings.
The nurse and I managed to chase them away, but not before
they had trampled down a border of pinks and lilies in the
cruellest way, and made great holes in a bed of China roses,
and even begun to nibble at a Jackmanni clematis that I am trying
to persuade to climb up a tree trunk. The gloomy gardener
happened to be ill in bed, and the assistant was at vespers--
as Lutheran Germany calls afternoon tea or its equivalent--
so the nurse filled up the holes as well as she could with mould,
burying the crushed and mangled roses, cheated for ever of their
hopes of summer glory, and I stood by looking on dejectedly.
The June baby, who is two feet square and valiant beyond
her size and years, seized a stick much bigger than herself
and went after the cows, the cowherd being nowhere to be seen.
She planted herself in front of them brandishing her stick,
and they stood in a row and stared at her in great astonishment;
and she kept them off until one of the men from the farm