SEPTEMBER 3 



teaching us the use to which we can put our own natural 

 gifts. We must have these gifts before we can learn the 

 use of them. Without them reading teaches us nothing.' 

 One friend wrote : ' I should have liked the book 

 still better if the moral and domestic reflections had been 

 jumbled up with the rest, instead of being put, like an 

 appendix, at the end.' With this I entirely agree, but my 

 judgment in the matter was overruled by others. The 

 most general criticism has been that the various subjects 

 in the book are not kept enough apart. Some asked 

 ' Won't you write a cookery book alone? or a gardening 

 book alone?' I could only say that I am no specialist. 

 Dozens of such books exist, and are much better than 

 any I could write. I am and must remain an ignorant 

 amateur. My mind only works, as I said before, on the 

 lines of collecting knowledge, sweet and bitter, as I walk 

 along life's way. What I have I can give, but I can 

 neither create nor imagine. The accusations of the sud- 

 den jumps from gardening to surgery, or from cooking 

 to art, which astonished my readers, are perfectly true. 

 But are not these violent and sudden contrasts a marked 

 characteristic of modern life ? Do we not, many of us, 

 any morning, go from our letters or newspapers — con- 

 taining, perhaps, the most tragic human stories, affect- 

 ing ourselves or those we love — to the ordering of the 

 dinner for the friend who is to come in the evening, or 

 seeing that the carriage or the fly is not forgotten for 

 the guest who is leaving before noon? Such is life. So 

 my months must remain quite as varied as before. It is 

 sad to have to repeat the un-English name of 'Pot- 

 Pourri,' which annoyed so many and was never very 

 satisfactory to myself; but this book in no way aims at 

 being more than a continuation of the first, a kind of 

 second volume, a giving of more to those who ask for it. 

 The -wovA' pot-pourri' is so generally accepted in Eng- 



