care it is, I remarked with surprise that she had no sweet-peas. I
called them _Lathyrus odoratus_, and she, having little Latin, did not
understand. Then I called them _wohlriechende Wicken_, the German
rendering of that which sounds so pretty in English, and she said she
had never heard of them. The idea of an existence in a garden yet
without sweet-peas, so willing, so modest, and so easily grown, had
never presented itself as possible to my imagination. Ever since I can
remember, my summers have been filled with them; and in the days when I
sat in my own perambulator and they were three times as tall as I was, I
well recollect a certain waving hedge of them in the garden of my
childhood, and how I stared up longingly at the flowers so far beyond my
reach, inaccessibly tossing against the sky. When I grew bigger and had
a small garden of my own, I bought their seeds to the extent of twenty
pfennings, and trained the plants over the rabbit-hutch that was the
chief feature in the landscape. There were other seeds in that garden
seeds on which I had laid out all my savings and round which played my
fondest hopes, but the sweet-peas were the only ones that came up. The
same thing happened here in my first summer, my gardening knowledge not
having meanwhile kept pace with my years, and of the seeds sown that
first season sweet-peas again were the only ones that came up. I should
say they were just the things for people with very little time and
experience at their disposal to grow. A garden might be made beautiful
with sweet-peas alone, and, with hardly any labour, except the sweet
labour of picking to prolong the bloom, be turned into a fairy bower of
delicacy and refinement. Yet the Frau Inspector not only had never heard
of them, but, on my showing her a bunch, was not in the least impressed,
and led me in her garden to a number of those exceedingly vulgar red
herbaceous peonies growing among her currant bushes, and announced with
conviction that they were her favourite flower. It was on the tip of my
tongue to point out that in these days of tree-peonies, and peonies so