174 A GARDEN DIARY 
APRIL 18, 1900 
yu even dull, and quite unfeathered bipeds 
have their glimmerings now and then of 
sense, and of instinct. There are hours in which 
the great Mother befriends them, as she does the 
rest of her two-legged, four-legged, or many- 
legged offspring. That she should continue to 
do so is I think amiable, and rather surprising 
on her part; when one considers how they dis- 
obey and deride her ; how they sit day after day 
in stuffy rooms, eating dinners of many courses ; 
hardly ever getting up to see the sun rise, or 
doing any of the other things she directs, and 
which her better-behaved scholars invariably do. 
In spite of this, when the right winds blow, 
when the spring is afoot, and the leaves are be- 
ginning to bud, she allows the old visions to return 
to them. She brings back the old voices from the 
old haunts, to whisper once more in their ears, so 
that for the moment they forget the years that 
the locust has eaten, and their own incredible 
stupidities, and all that has been, and time rolls 
