lovely as a bowl of sweet-peas, or a Delf jar filled with them. What a
mass of glowing, yet delicate colour it is! How prettily, the moment you
open the door, it seems to send its fragrance to meet you! And how you
hang over it, and bury your face in it, and love it, and cannot get away
from it. I really am sorry for all the people in the world who miss such
keen pleasure. It is one that each person who opens his eyes and his
heart may have; and indeed, most of the things that are really worth
having are within everybody's reach. Any one who chooses to take a
country walk, or even the small amount of trouble necessary to get him
on to his doorstep and make him open his eyes, may have them, and there
are thousands of them thrust upon us by nature, who is for ever giving
and blessing, at every turn as we walk. The sight of the first pale
flowers starring the copses; an anemone held up against the blue sky
with the sun shining through it towards you; the first fall of snow in
the autumn; the first thaw of snow in the spring; the blustering, busy
winds blowing the winter away and scurrying the dead, untidy leaves into
the corners; the hot smell of pines--just like blackberries--when the
sun is on them; the first February evening that is fine enough to show
how the days are lengthening, with its pale yellow strip of sky behind
the black trees whose branches are pearled with raindrops; the swift
pang of realisation that the winter is gone and the spring is coming;
the smell of the young larches a few weeks later; the bunch of cowslips
that you kiss and kiss again because it is so perfect, because it is so
divinely sweet, because of all the kisses in the world there is none
other so exquisite--who that has felt the joy of these things would
exchange them, even if in return he were to gain the whole world, with
all its chimney-pots, and bricks, and dust, and dreariness? And we know
that the gain of a world never yet made up for the loss of a soul.

One day, in going round the head inspector's garden with his wife, whose