20 MY GARDEN 



story of our decline and fall. Nevertheless, not a 

 little can be said on our side also. It is we who made 

 the place not the tradesmen. I warn our busy 

 merchant princes that the resorters they now seek 

 to lure among us won't pay the present prices for 

 anything from a piano to a bootlace ; and they 

 won't rebuild our villas when we have departed from 

 them. Try as the local authorities will to catch the 

 spirit of Margate, or emulate the merry promiscuity 

 of Herne Bay, it cannot be done. We are too far 

 from the genial influence of the metropolis for that. 

 Personally, I merely wait here in dignified patience 

 and self-control for the advent of the first Ethiopian 

 serenader. He may already be here, but I have not 

 met with him. When I do, I shall rise up, and take 

 my staff, and hie me to the recesses of certain moun- 

 tains where resorters cease from troubling and the 

 tax-gatherers are at rest. Yes, you local geniuses, 

 you are killing the goose with the golden egg, and 

 seeking those that produce only copper and silver. 

 There is a dreadful day of reckoning at hand. 



My kitchen garden now offers little to attract the 

 aesthetic eye ; though once I grew nothing in it but 

 flowers, and then it was a very beautiful spectacle. 

 To see annuals in perfection, a mere paltry patch is 

 not enough. But given a few square yards of each, 

 and we realise their beauty. My kitchen garden 

 blazed with colour and hummed with bees in those 

 days. From broad streaks and flames and patches 

 of scarlet and gold, blue and white, orange and 

 lavender, the fruit trees sprang ; then came a shadow 



