and where Scarlatti lives and where you, too, may expect to go if you
please them. Even the black cat will probably go there--one's own
black cat. But not the neighbour's cat--the reddish-brown one--thief,
murderer and beast. It is the neighbour's cat that makes one believe
there is a hell.

Short is the memory of man, however. Shorter the memory of children.
There is no gloom that can withstand May pouring itself out in the
deep blue of anchusa and the paler blue of lupin, gushing out in the
yellow of laburnum, tossing like the tides in the wind. One is gloomy,
perhaps, when one looks at the lettuces and sees how slow is their
growth. Watching a plant grow is like watching a kettle boil. It seems
to take æons. The patience of gardeners always astonishes me. Were
gardening my profession, I should spend half my time inventing schemes
for making plants grow up in a night like Jonah's gourd. I should not
mind about parsnips. A parsnip might mature as slowly as an oak and
live as long for all I care. There is something, it may be, to be said
for parsnips, as there is something, it may be, to be said for Mr
Bonar Law. But I do not know it. They do not even tempt the slugs and
the leather-jackets away from the lettuces. There is nothing that
puzzles one more in a friend than if he confesses to a taste for
parsnips. Immediately, a gulf yawns deeper than could be caused by any
confession of religious or moral eccentricity. One's sympathies
instinctively close up like a sea-anemone touched by a child's finger.
Yet people eat them. All that you and I know about them is that kind
words do not butter them; but, if you go to Covent Garden at the right
time of the year, you will undoubtedly find them being sold for food.
Why should they make one gloomy, however, seeing that one has
successfully excluded them from one's garden? Perhaps one is gloomy
because of the reflection that there must be many other gardens in