Jane Admires 



the back, or to adopt a manner that is in the 

 slightest degree artificial ; and when I look back 

 on it, it seems to me that the trees must have 

 suffered agonies in the days when I came down 

 from London for only a month or two in the 

 year. Even now there are difficult moments, such 

 moments as bear their fruit in the caustic com- 

 ments I hear from the characters of fiction in the 

 study. It is a dreadful thought that in the evening 

 when their day's work is over, the flowers discuss 

 my failings, and the lingering bees hear and carry 

 away the tale of them to their hives. Bees sweeten 

 their honey with gossip, and the things they over- 

 hear and never understand. Bees think perfectly 

 clearly about their own affairs, but about human 

 affairs they are quite silly — almost as silly as human 

 beings, without their excuses. 



Strange things do happen in the garden, strange 

 shapes and shadows hover in the woods, and on 

 moonlight nights in spring and autumn one is often 

 sure that odd creatures run and chatter, and dart 

 away so quickly that one can never see them. See- 

 ing is not always believing, and believing is very 

 little a matter of seeing. What you see, dear Jane, 

 is only a millionth part of what you might see, only 

 a thousandth part of what you will see when you 

 have trained your eyes to know — more or less — 



23 



