A GARDEN DIARY 77 
to carry its own justification. As it happens 
I was out yesterday in a rather exceptionally 
imposing hail-storm. It was so dry that there 
was no occasion to hurry, and I stood still for 
a while to study effects. The stones, as they 
pattered and rattled round me, might—danger 
apart—have quite served as a suggestion of the 
other sort of rattling and pattering. Looking 
at them dispassionately I inquired of myself, 
“Would one run?” and Truth—there being no 
one else present—promptly replied, ‘ Madly!” 
So, save for the grace of acquired training, I 
take it would nearly everybody. My hail bullets 
seemed to be in a prodigious hurry, and were 
being prodigally, if not very scientifically, directed 
by marksmen concealed somewhere above Leith 
hill. They hissed, they danced, they ricochetted 
off the trees, they bespattered the ground in all 
directions in a very businesslike and realistic 
fashion. There was a good deal of snow still 
lying unmelted in corners, and into that snow 
the new-comers as they fell cut deep little pits, 
and disappeared from sight in an instant. Else- 
where they drove in white flocks over the ground, 
hardly melting at all. They were not quite so 
large as carrots, as someone assured me that he 
had once seen hailstones, but they were certainly 
as large as fair-sized gooseberries. Through 
such a furious hail—only appropriately black— 
