The crow's-nest

There is an attraction about carpets and curtains, chairs and sofas, and the mantelpiece which is hard to explain, and harder to resist. I feel it in all its insidious power thi...

The principal object on the shelf is the house, but it also supports the pencil-cedar, and the garden sits on it, and at the back the servants’ quarters and stables just don’t s...

There is a right side and a wrong side to the mountain of Simla, for it was a mountain eight thousand feet high and equally important long before it became the summer headquarte...

People are often removed from their proper social spheres in this world and placed in others which they think lower and generally less worthy of them. Their distant and haughty...

It was an event this morning when Thalia came whisking along the Mall in her rickshaw and turned in here. The Mall, I should mention, is the only road in Simla that has a name....

It is a dull and serious day. As my family declare that I have become a mere barometer of my former self, this will perhaps be, but I am not certain, a dull and serious chapter....

There are many methods of gardening. I have known people who were not content with anything but actually digging and weeding, grubbing up the curly wet worms and the tough roots...

This is going to be a day of roses, a grand opening day. They have been getting ready for weeks; every morning there has been a show of pink promises, half kept, white hints and...

I am not getting on at all; it is days since Delia was here and I wrote about her. There is certainly this advantage in the walls of a house, they make a fold for your mind, whi...

The Princess has a hill almost entirely to herself. She lives there in a castle almost entirely made of stone, with turrets and battlements. Her affectionate subjects cluster ab...

If you choose to live on the top of one of the Himalayas there are some things you must particularly pay for. One of them is earth. Your mountain, if it is to be depended upon,...

To-day I think India, down below there on the other side of the hill, must be at its hottest. A white dust haze hangs over the plains, but we know what is going on under it; nea...

I have had a morning of domestic details with the Average Woman. I don’t quite know whether one ought to write about such things, or whether one ought to draw a veil; I have not...

The rains have come. They were due on the fifteenth of June and they are late; this is the twentieth. The whole of yesterday afternoon we could see them beating up the valleys,...

I find it desirable to sit more and more out in the rain. A little stouter protection, a little more determination, and the cane chair will soon weather anything. There are stil...

I have heard crying in the nursery; it is the most babyish and plaintive repetition of the old birds’ note, but it grows daily stronger, more importunate. The parent birds utter...

We have arrived at September and the rains are “breaking.” For two months and a half they have trampled upon us steadily, armies on the march; now they come in scattered battali...

We have entered upon the period of our great glory and content; it is second summer in these hills, with just a crisp hint of autumn coming. There is nothing left of the rains b...

I was congratulating the hydrangea this morning on its delightful attitude toward life. This is no virtue of the hydrangea’s; it is a thing conferred, a mere capacity, but how e...

It is sharp on these mountains now, keen, glorious weather. In the house Thisbe cowers over a fire from morning to night. I call it abject; she retorts that no English winter ha...