Page:Letters from India Vol 1.djvu/214

 the plants do not grow up in a night, as I thought they would, but they have done a great deal in six weeks. Do you know the Gloriosa superba?—a fine invention, and it grows almost wild here. We cannot achieve a cowslip, and nobody has ever seen a daisy, but the yucca (I do not know how it is spelt—a sort of aloe I mean), with its thousands of white bells, grows along the sides of every road, and lovely it looks. Then there are roses all the year round here; that is some compensation. My garden is really pretty, but as I mean to make a sketch of it for you, whenever it is cool enough to sketch, I won’t describe it. I have had a sort of altar built in the middle of it, in imitation of one I saw at the head of a ghaut, the vase thereof to be filled with flowers. It was finished the hot day we were at Barrackpore. The natives do those things beautifully, and make them smooth and shining, like marble, with a composition they call chunam. My altar was built, and covered with all sorts of pretty ornaments; the three stark-naked savages who had put it up were admiring their work and putting a finishing touch here and there, when there came on one of those storms