Muller posture and gaze at the view. It is never the same two hours of
the day, and I never weary of looking at it.

My garden would make you chortle with glee. You will have to take it by
degrees, as I do. I have a sort of bowing acquaintance with it
myself--en masse, so to speak. I hardly know a thing in it by name. I
have wall fruit on the south side and an orchard of plum, pear, and
cherry trees on the north side. The east side is half lawn and half
disorderly flower beds. I am going to let the tangle in the orchard
grow at its own sweet will--that is, I am going to as far as Amelie
allows me. I never admire some trailing, flowering thing there that,
while I am admiring it, Amelie does not come out and pull it out of the
ground, declaring it une salete and sure to poison the whole place if
allowed to grow. Yet some of these same saletes are so pretty and grow
so easily that I am tempted not to care. One of these trials of my life
is what I am learning to know as liserone--we used to call it wild
morning-glory. That I am forbidden to have--if I want anything else.
But it is pretty.

I remember years ago to have heard Ysolet, in a lecture at the Sorbonne,
state that the "struggle for life" among the plants was fiercer and more
tragic than that among human beings. It was mere words to me then. In
the short three weeks that I have been out here in my hilltop garden I
have learned to know how true that was. Sometimes I am tempted to have a
garden of weeds. I suppose my neighbors would object if I let them all
go to seed and sow these sins of agriculture all over the tidy farms
about me.

Often these lovely mornings I take a long walk with the dog before
breakfast. He is an Airedale, and I am terribly proud of him and my
neighbors terribly afraid of him. I am half inclined to believe that he
is as afraid of them as they are of him, but I keep that suspicion, for
prudential reasons, to myself. At any rate, all passers keep at a
respectful distance from me and him.

Our usual walk is down the hill to the north, toward the shady route
that leads by the edge of the canal to Meaux. We go along the fields,
down the long hill until we strike into a footpath which leads through
the woods to the road called "Paves du Roi" and on to the canal, from
which a walk of five minutes takes us to the Marne. After we cross the
road at the foot of the hill there is not a house, and the country is so
pretty--undulating