So began to jig and jingle my thoughts as in my letters and newspapers this morning I read, buried alive among the solitary fastnesses of the Surrey hills, the last news from town.  The news I envied most was that spring had already reached London.  ‘Now,’ ran a pretty article on spring fashions, ’the sunshine makes bright the streets, and the flower-baskets, like huge bouquets, announce the gay arrival of spring.’  I looked up and out through my hillside window.  The black ridge on the other side of the valley stood a grim wall of burnt heather against the sky—­which sky, like the bullets in the nursery rhyme, was made unmistakably of lead; a close rain was falling methodically, and, generally speaking, the world looked like a soaked mackintosh.  It wasn’t much like the gay arrival of spring, and grimly I mused on the advantages of life in town.

Certainly, it did seem hard, I reflected, that town should be ahead of us even in such a country matter as spring.  Flower-baskets indeed!  Why, we haven’t as much as a daisy for miles around.  It is true that on the terrace there the crocuses blaze like a street on fire, that the primroses thicken into clumps, lying among their green leaves like pounds of country butter; it is true that the blue cones of the little grape hyacinth are there, quaintly formal as a child’s toy-flowers; yes! and the big Dutch hyacinths are already shamelessly enceinte with their buxom waxen blooms, so fat and fragrant—­(one is already delivered of a fine blossom.  Well, that is a fine baby, to be sure! say the other hyacinths, with babes no less bonny under their own green aprons—­all waiting for the doctor sun).  Then among the blue-green blades of the narcissus, here and there you see a stem topped with a creamish chrysalis-like envelope, from which will soon emerge a beautiful eye, rayed round with white wings, looking as though it were meant to fly, but remaining rooted—­a butterfly on a stalk; while all the beds are crowded with indeterminate beak and blade, pushing and elbowing each other for a look at the sun, which, however, sulkily declines to look at them.  It is true there is spring on the terrace, but even so it is spring imported from the town—­spring bought in Holborn, spring delivered free by parcel post; for where would the terrace have been but for the city seedsman—­that magician who sends you strangely spotted beans and mysterious bulbs in shrivelled cerements, weird little flower-mummies that suggest centuries of forgotten silence in painted Egyptian tombs.  This strange and shrivelled thing can surely never live again, we say, as we hold it in our hands, seeing not the glowing circles of colour, tiny rings of Saturn, packed so carefully inside this flower-egg, the folds of green and silver silk wound round and round the precious life within.