but nothing ever came of that to speak of.
Besides several daisies, quite a den of
dandelions, and a handful of mustard and cress
(with J. and A. P. in a cipher) under the
north wall, there are but three marigolds, a
crown imperial, and a very limited extent of
mignonette. Vegetables will not grow in our
back garden. Fruits would be sure to be
feloniously abstracted before they could
attain maturity. Grass only flourishes here
and there (from motives which I do not
understand), in minute green patches, and is
scant and mangy everywhere else. In some
places it is so short that it looks as if it had
been mown (with a saw) only yesterday; in
others, it is quite long enough to make very
tolerable hay.

The proprietors of other back gardens in
our vicinity seem aware, either from
experience or instinct, that nothing can be made
of these retreats, and leave them just as they
find them. They call them, with an honesty
which we cannot yet quite bring ourselves
to emulate, back-greens; as gardens they
bear, almost exclusively, clothes' props and
empty bottles.

Upon our first coming into possession of
our territory, we prided ourselves upon its
having in it an elder-bush,—the only tree
visible in the horizon,—but we now regret
that circumstance. This shrub forms the
natural staircase by which a thousand cats
make, into our back-garden, their exits and
their entrances. It is the trysting-place of
the young, the battle-field of the old, and
the spot peculiarly devoted to their general
refreshment; and hither, as to a picnic, they
each carry their peculiar delicacy, and never
trouble themselves to clear away a single
bone. Whether it is they who bring the
spirit-bottles which we find there in the
morning, broken, or whether those are
chucked over the wall by our neighbours, I
do not rightly know; but the drunken
choruses which are unquestionably indulged
in by our feline visitors, incline me to the
former opinion. At all events, that back
garden, in which we had placed such tender
hopes, is rendered, by these various influences,
the home of desolation and riot.

Our income being, as I have described,
but limited, it behoves us much to practise
economy, and my beloved wife is always
striking out some new line of domestic
conduct by which vast sums are to be saved.
Many of these have appeared to me to be
so unpromising that I have declined ever
to give them a fair chance. It may have
been cheaper—she said it was—to supply
ourselves with pork without the intervention
of a butcher (the hams we had bought
indeed, had all been failures, and not
Westphalias either), but still I could not bring
myself to keep a pig in our back garden;
and whatever quantity the child, a very
thriving one, might require, of new milk,
I was not going to undertake, in that
extremely limited space, the sole management
of a cow. Even fowls, although the price of
a trussed chicken sometimes staggered me,
I was determined not to maintain alive at
the back of my house, to keep me up all
night,—as they did some poultry proprietors,
—watching over their personal safety with a
blunderbuss.

However, opposed as I am to change, my
better half assisted by her unscrupulous ally,
the cook, did persuade me once to deal no
longer at the market; but with a peculiarly
honest farmer, in a most picturesque part of
the country, and where the air was
especially adapted for the fattening of fowls.
The birds were to come dead, but in their
feathers, by a wonderfully cheap carrier's
cart; so that they would be delivered at our
own door for almost nothing.

This scheme would doubtless have turned
out admirably, but that the picturesque farm
was such a long way off and the wonderfully
cheap carrier so slow in his movements, that
the two couple of economical chickens would
not stand the treatment, but made themselves
offensive to the whole house. The
cook persisted that they would still be very
nice and tender in the eating, but it was
with a faltering voice; and she made no
response to my challenge when I dared her
to hang them up by their legs. They were
very cheap at six and sixpence to eat
(which was, indeed, at least eighteenpence
lower than the trade price), but they were
not cheap at any price (as I tried to explain
to Mrs. P.) to bury in the back garden,
which had to be done at once. I had
nowhere else to put them, and therefore
interred them in that spot by help of the
dust-shovel, trusting never to see them more.
Alas! as in the case of Mr. Eugene Aram,
my secret was one that earth refused to keep.
Feline bodysnatchers disinterred those four
corpses during the night, and lo! in the
morning the ghastly fragments of bone and
feather and skin and sinew over the whole of
our back garden! Nothing can be likened
unto it, except the ravage which the vultures
make in the Desert upon the victims of that
wind which never blows anybody good, the
simoom.

Notwithstanding the utter failure of our
cheap chickens, I discovered one Saturday,
from some snatches of conversation between
my wife and the cook, as well as from a
certain air of oppressive secrecy pervading
the household, such as is apt to precede
great events, that some culinary change was
in contemplation.

"My dear," observed I, at once, with
unwonted firmness, "I do trust there is nothing
more coming by that carrier."

"Nothing," she replied, with an air of
triumph; "nothing that is of the nature which
you imagine. Nothing that will spoil, my love;
but something that will be, on the contrary,
a delightful treat!"