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 speculated as to whether the Crag wore pajamas or not, and I don’t see that I should have been surprised that he did instead of the night shirt of our common ancestry.

He came around the side of the house out of the sun-shot mist and was half way down the garden path before I saw him or he saw me, and I must say that his unconcern under the circumstances was rather remarkable.

He was attired in a light blue silk pajama jacket that was open at the throat and half way down his broad breast.  He had on his usual gray trousers, but tag’s of blue trailed out and ruffled around his bare ankles, and across his bare heels that protruded from his slippers.  His hair was in heavy tousled black curls all over his head and his gray eyes were positively mysterious with interrupted dreams.  In one hand he carried a tin can and in the other a small pointed stick, which looked murderously fitted for the extermination of the marauders.