62 A GARDEN DIARY 
OcTOBER 27, 1899 
HO dare forecast even his nearest future ? 
These last four weeks have been so charged 
with anxiety—not only, or even chiefly, war anxie- 
ties—that I have not made so much as a single 
entry in this diary. In fact there has been nothing 
to record. The poor little garden; its flowers ; 
its weeds; the copse surrounding it; the entire 
mise-en-scéene, with all the quips and jests which 
in sunnier hours it gives rise to, seems to have 
vanished bodily. It is as though the whole thing, 
erstwhile not without its own little importance, had 
dwindled to the size of one of those infinitesimal 
specks, which one sometimes sees in feverish 
dreams ; specks so dim and small, so well-nigh 
invisible, that one wonders how in the first place 
one ever discovered them, and why, having done 
so, one should take the trouble of trying to keep 
them in sight. That being the case it is as well 
that I am leaving home to-morrow for several 
weeks, and, since I shall be chiefly in London, 
have a good excuse for leaving the garden diary, 
