The garden of resurrection

BEING THE LOVE STORY OF AN UGLY MAN
E. TEMPLE THURSTON
MITCHELL KENNERLEY NEW YORK 1911
COPYRIGHT 1911 BY MITCHELL KENNERLEY
THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A.
TO W.R. DAKIN, M.D.
My Dear Dakin :
Partly because you have a love of gardens, partly because together we have seen Ballysheen when the gorse was in its full blast of yellow, but most of all because I feel I owe you a debt of gratitude for a great friendship, I am asking you to accept this book of mine. It was after a talk with you one night that I went straight home and wrote Chapter I on a clean sheet of paper, therefore the book is doubly yours and I ask you to accept it in proof of the fact that, not only am I grateful, but also that I am
Your sincere friend, E. Temple Thurston.
Adelphi, 1911.
It was the first, the very first, day of spring. A man walked by me with a narcissus in his coat and he was humming a tune.
By the looks of him—the tail-coat, the bowler hat, the little leather hand-bag—he was an artisan. You know that game of placing people. I put him down as an electrician. He had been attending to a job up West. He was returning to the premises of his firm in Bond Street. All this, of course, was surmise. But of one thing I was certain. He had no business to be walking through the Park. He ought to have been on a 'bus, or in the Underground Railway, speeding back to save his firm's most precious time, ready to start forth once more upon his firm's most urgent errands. Instead of this—it was the first day of spring—he was walking through the Park and I was envying him. I envied the narcissus in his coat. Even the very tune he was humming touched a sense of covetousness in my heart.