e Harpeth Valley gives me
the agony of a dumb poet, who can feel though not sing.

It was spring when I came down here four months ago, a young, tender,
mist-veiled, lilac-scented spring that nestled firmly in your heart and
made it ache with sweetness that you hardly understood yourself.

But before I knew it the young darling, with her curls and buds and
apple-blooms had gone and summer was rioting over the gardens and fields
and hills, rich, lush colored, radiant, redolent, gorgeous, rose-scented
and pulsing with a life that made me breathless. Even the roads along
the valley were bordered with flowers that the sun had wooed to the
swooning point.

But this week, early as it is, there has been a hint of autumn in the
air, and a haze is beginning to creep over the whole world, especially
in the early mornings, which are so dew-gemmed that they seem to be
hinting a warning of the near coming of frost and snow.

My garden has grown into a perfect riot of blooms, but for the last two
weeks queer slugs have begun to eat the tender buds that are forming for
October blooming, and I have been mourning over it by day and by night
and to everybody who will listen.

Aunt Augusta insists that the only thing to do is to get up with the
first crack of dawn and carefully search out each slug, remove it and
destroy it. She says if this is done for a week they will be
exterminated.

I carefully explained it all to Jasper and when I came down to breakfast
he was coming in with three queer green things, also with an injured air
of having been kept up all night. I didn't feel equal to making him go
on with the combat and ignored the question for two days until I saw all
the buds on my largest Neron done for in one night.

I have always been able to get up at the break of day to go
sketching--it was at daybreak that I made my sketch in the Defleury
gardens that captured the French art eye enough to get me my Salon
mention. If I could get up to splash water-colors at that hour, I surely
could rush to the protection of my own roses, so I went to bed with gray
dawn on my mind and the shutters wide open so the first light would get
full in my eyes.

I am glad that it was a good bright ray that woke me and partly dazzled
me, for the sight I had, after I had been kneeling down in the rose bed
for fifteen minutes, was something of a shock to me, though no reason in
the world why it should have been. I can't remember that I ever
specul