FRANKNESS,—GARDENING AND OTHERWISE

(Mary Penrose to Barbara Campbell)

July 15.—Midsummer Night. Since the month came in, vacation time has been suspended, insomuch that Bart goes to the office every day, Saturdays excepted; but we have not returned to our indoor bedroom. Once it seemed the definition of airy coolness, with its three wide windows, white matting, and muslin draperies, but now—I fully understand the relative feelings of a bird in a cage and a bird in the open. The air blows through the bars and the sun shines through them, but it is still a cage.

In these warm, still nights we take down the slat screens that hang between the hand-hewn chestnut beams of the old barn, and with the open rafters of what was a hay-loft above us, we look out of the door-frame straight up at the stars and sometimes drag our cots out on the wide bank that tops the wall, overlooking the Opal Farm, and sleep wholly under the sky.

These two weeks past we have had the Infant with us at night, clad in a light woollen monkey-suit nighty with feet, her crib being, however, under cover. Her open-eyed wonder has been a new phase of the vacation. Knowing no fear, she has begun to develop a feeling of kinship with all the small animals, not only of the barn but dwellers on Opal Farm as well, and when she discovered a nest of small mice in an old tool-box under the eaves and proposed to take them, in their improvised house, to her very own room at the opposite end, this "room" being a square marked around her bed by small flower-pots, set upside down, I protested, as a matter of course, saying that mice were not things to handle, and besides they would die without their mother.

The Infant, still clutching the box, looked at me in round-eyed wonder: "I had Dinah and the kittens to play with in the nursery, didn't I, mother?"

"Certainly!"

"And when Ann-stasia brought them up in her ap'n, Dinah walked behind, didn't she?"

"Yes, I think so!"

"Ver-r-y well, the mouse mother will walk behind too, and I love mice better'n cats, for they have nicer hands; 'sides, mother, don't you know who mice really and truly are, and why they have to hide away? They are the horses that fairlies drive, and I'm going to have these for the fairlies in my village!" making a sweep of her arm toward the encampment of flower-pots; "if you want fairlies to stay close beside your bed, you must give them horses to drive, 'cause when it gets cold weather cobwebs gets too sharp for them to ride on and there isn't always fireflies 'n candle worms to show 'em the way,—'n it's true, 'cause Larry says so!" she added, probably seeing the look of incredulity on my face.

"Larry knows fairlies and they're really trulies; if you're bad to them, you'll see the road and it won't be there, and so you'll get into Hen'sy's bog! Larry did,—and if you make houses for them like mine (pointing to the flower-pots) and give 'em drinks of milk and flower wine, they'll bring you lots of childrens! They did to Larry, so I'm trying to please 'em wif my houses, so's to have some to play wif!"

Larry's harmless folklore (for when he is quite himself, as he is in these days, he has a certain refinement and an endless fund of marvellous legends and stories), birds and little beasts for friends, dolls cut from paper with pansies fastened on for faces, morning-glories for cups in which to give the fairies drink, what could make a more blissful childhood for our little maid? That is the everlasting pity of a city childhood. Creature comforts may be had and human friends, but where is the vista that reaches under the trees and through the long meadow-grass where the red-gold lily bells tinkle, up the brook bed to the great flat mossy rock, beneath which is the door to fairyland, the spotted turtle being warder. Fairyland, the country of eternal youth and possibility!

I wouldn't give up the fairies that I once knew and peopled the solemn woods with down in grandfather's Virginia home for a fortune, and even now, any day, I can put my ear to the earth, like Tommy-Anne, and hear the grass grow. It occurred to me yesterday that the Infant, in age, temperament, and heredity, is suited to be a companion for your Richard. Could you not bring him down with you before the summer is over? Though, as the unlike sometimes agree best, Ian and she might be more compatible, so bring them both and we will turn the trio loose in the meadows of Opal Farm with a mite of a Shetland pony that The Man from Everywhere has recently bestowed upon the Infant—crazy, extravagant man! What we shall do with it in winter I do not know, as we cannot yet run into the expense of keeping such live stock. But why bother? it is only midsummer now, grazing is plentiful and seems to suit the needs of this spunky little beast, and the Infant riding him "across country," as Bart calls her wanderings about Opal Farm, is a spectacle too pretty to be denied us. Yes, I know I'm silly, and that you have the twins to rhapsodize about, but girls are so much more picturesque in the clothes! What! thought she wore gingham bloomers! Yes, but not all the time, for Maria will frill her up and run her with ribbons of afternoons!

Back to the house and garden! I'm wandering, but then I'm Lady Lazy this summer, as The Man from Everywhere calls me, and naturally a bit inconsequent! As I said, Bart is at the office daily, and will be for another week, but Lady Lazy has not returned to what Maria Maxwell calls "The Tyranny of the Three M's,"—the mending basket, the market book, and the money-box! I was willing, quite willing; in fact it is only fair that Maria should have her time of irresponsibility, for I know that she has half a dozen invitations to go to pleasant places and meet people, one being from Lavinia Cortright to visit her shore cottage. I'm always hoping that Maria may meet the "right man" some summer day, but that she surely will never do if she stays here.

"I've everything systematized, and it's easier for me to go on than drop the needles for a fortnight or so and then find, on coming back, that you have been knitting a mitten when I had started the frame of a sock," Maria said, laughing; "make flower hay while the crop is to be had for the gathering, my lady! Another year you may not have such free hands!"

Then my protests grew weaker and weaker, for the establishment had thriven marvellously well without my daily interference. The jam closet shows rows of everything that might be made of strawberries, cherries, currants, and raspberries, and it suddenly struck me that possibly if domestic machinery is set going on a consistent basis, whether it is not a mistake to do too much oiling and tightening of a screw here and there, unless distinct symptoms of a halt render it absolutely necessary.

"Very well," I said, with a show of spunk, "give me one single task, that I may not feel as if I had no part in the homemaking. Something as ornamental and frivolous as you choose, but that shall occupy me at least two hours a day!"

Maria paused a moment; we were then standing in front of the fireplace, where a jar of bayberry filled the place of logs between the andirons. First, casting her eyes through the doors of dining room, living room, and den, she fixed them on me with rather a mischievous twinkle, as she said, "You shall gather and arrange the flowers for the house; and always have plenty of them, but never a withered or dropsical blossom among them all. You shall also invent new ways for arranging them, new combinations, new effects, the only restriction being that you shall not put vases where the water will drip on books, or make the house look like the show window of a wholesale florist. I will give you a fresh mop, and you can have the back porch and table for your workshop, and if I'm not mistaken, you will find two hours a day little enough for the work!" she added with very much the air of some one engaging a new housemaid and presenting her with a broom!

It has never taken me two hours to gather and arrange the flowers, and though of course we are only beginning to have much of a garden, we've always had flowers in the house,—quantities of sweet peas and such things, besides wild flowers. I began to protest, an injured feeling rising in my throat, that she, Maria Maxwell, music teacher, city bound for ten years, should think to instruct me of recent outdoor experience.

"Yes, you've always had flowers, but did you pick the sweet peas or did Barney? Did you cram them haphazard into the first thing that came handy (probably that awful bowl decorated in ten discordant colours and evidently a wedding present, for such atrocities never find any other medium of circulation)? Or did you separate them nicely, and arrange the pink and salmon peas with the lavender in that plain-coloured Sevres vase that is unusually accommodating in the matter of water, then putting the gay colours in the blue-and-white Delft bowl and the duller ones in cut glass to give them life? Having plenty, did you change them every other day, or the moment the water began to look milky, or did you leave them until the flowers clung together in the first stages of mould? Meanwhile, the ungathered flowers on the vines were seriously developing peas and shortening their stems to be better able to bear their weight. And, Mary Penrose,"—here Maria positively glared at me as if I had been a primary pupil in the most undesirable school of her route who was both stone deaf and afflicted with catarrh, "did you wash out your jars and vases with a mop every time you changed the flowers, and wipe them on a towel separate from the ones used for the pantry glass? No, you never did! You tipped the water out over there at the end of the piazza by the honeysuckles, because you couldn't quite bring yourself to pouring it down the pantry sink, refilled the vases, and that was all!"

In spite of a certain sense of annoyance that I felt at the way in which Maria was giving me a lecture, and somehow when a person has taught for ten years she (particularly she) inevitably acquires a rather unpleasant way of imparting the truth that makes one wish to deny it, I stood convicted in my own eyes as well as in Maria's. It had so often happened that when either Barney had brought in the sweet peas and left them on the porch table, or Bart had gathered a particularly beautiful wild bouquet in one of his tramps, I had lingered over a book or some bit of work upstairs until almost the time for the next meal, and then, seeing the half-withered look of reproach that flowers wear when they have been long out of water, I have jammed them helter-skelter into the first receptacle at hand.

Sometimes a little rough verbal handling stirs up the blood under a too-complacent cuticle. Maria's preachment did me good, the more probably because the time was ripe for it, and therefore the past two weeks have been filled with new pleasures, for another thing that the month spent in the open has shown me is the wonderful setting the natural environment and foliage gives to a flower. At first the completeness appeals insensibly, and unless one is of the temperament that seeks the cause behind the effect, it might never be realized.

The Japanese have long since arrived at a method of arranging flowers which is quality and intrinsic value as opposed to miscellaneous quantity. The way of nature, however, it seems to me, is twofold, for there are flowers that depend for beauty, and this with nature that seems only another word for perpetuity, upon the strength of numbers, as well as those that make a more individual appeal. The composite flowers—daisies, asters, goldenrod—belong to the class that take naturally to massing, while the blue flag, meadow and wood lilies, together with the spiked orchises, are typical of the second.

By the same process of comparison I have decided that jars and vases having floral decorations themselves are wholly unsuitable for holding flowers. They should be cherished as bric-a-brac, when they are worthy specimens of the art of potter and painter, but as receptacles for flowers they have no use beyond holding sprays of beautiful foliage or silver-green masses of ferns.

Porcelain, plain in tint and of carefully chosen colours, such as beef-blood, the old rose, and peach-blow hues, in which so many simple forms and inexpensive bits of Japanese pottery may be bought, a peculiar creamy yellow, a dull green, gobelin, and Delft blue and white, sacred to the jugs and bowls of our grandmothers, all do well. Cut glass is a fine setting for flowers of strong colour, but kills the paler hues, and above and beyond all is the dark moss-green glass of substantial texture that is fashioned in an endless variety of shapes. By chance, gift, and purchase we have gathered about a dozen pieces of this, ranging from a cylinder almost the size of an umbrella-stand down through fluted, hat-shaped dishes, for roses or sweet peas, to some little troughs of conventional shapes in which pansies or other short-stemmed flowers may be arranged so as to give the look of an old-fashioned parterre to the dining table.

I had always found these useful, but never quite realized to the full that green or brown is the only consistent undercolour for all field and grass-growing flowers until this summer. But during days that I have spent browsing in the river woods, while Bart and Barney, and more recently Larry, have been digging the herbs that we have marked, I have realized the necessity of a certain combination of earth, bark, and dead-leaf browns in the receptacles for holding wood flowers and the vines that in their natural ascent clasp and cling to the trunks and limbs of trees.

Several years ago mother sent me some pretty flower-holders made of bamboos of different lengths, intended evidently to hang against door-jambs or in hallways. The pith was hollowed out here and there, and the hole plugged from beneath to make little water pockets. These did admirably for a season, but when the wood dried, it invariably split, and treacherous dripping followed, most ruinous to furniture.

A few weeks back, when looking at some mossed and gnarled branches in the woods, an idea occurred to Bart and me at the same moment. Why could we not use such pieces as these, together with some trunks of your beloved white birch, to which I, via the screen at Opal Farm, was becoming insensibly devoted at the very time that you wrote me?

Augur holes could be bored in them at various distances and angles, if not too acute; the thing was to find glass, in bottle or other forms, to fit in the openings. This difficulty was solved by The Man from Everywhere on his reappearance the night before the Fourth, after an absence of a whole week, laden with every manner of noise and fire making arrangement for the Infant, though I presently found that Bart had partly instigated the outfit, and the two overgrown boys revelled in fire-balloons and rockets under cover of the Infant's enthusiasm, much as the grandpa goes to the circus as an apparent martyr to little Tommy's desire! A large package that, from the extreme care of its handling, I judged must hold something highly explosive, on being opened divulged many dozens of the slender glass tubes, with a slight lip for holding cord or wire, such as, filled with roses or orchids, are hung in the garlands of asparagus vines and smilax in floral decorations of either houses or florists' windows. These tubes varied in length from four to six inches, the larger being three inches in diameter.

"Behold your leak-proof interiors!" he cried, holding one up. "Now set your wits and Bart's tool-box to work and we shall have some speedy results!"

Dear Man from Everywhere, he had bought a gross of the glasses, thereby reminding me of a generous but eccentric great-uncle of ours who had a passion for attending auctions, and once, by error, in buying, as he supposed, twelve yellow earthenware bowls, found himself confronted by twelve dozen. Thus grandmother's storeroom literally had a golden lining, and my entire childhood was pervaded with these bowls, several finally falling into my possession for the mixing of mud pies! But between the durability of yellow bowls and blown-glass tubes there is little parallel, and already I have found the advantage of having a good supply in stock.

Our first natural flower-holder is a great success. Having found a four-pronged silver birch, with a broken top, over in the abandoned gravel-pit (where, by the way, are a score of others to be had for the digging, and such easy digging too), Larry sawed it off a bit below the ground, so as to give it an even base. The diameter of the four uprights was not quite a foot, all told, and these were sawn of unequal lengths of four, six, seven, and nine inches, care being taken not to "haggle," as Larry calls it, the clean white bark in the process.

Then Bart went to work with augur and round chisel, and bored and chipped out the holes for the glass tubes, incidentally breaking two glasses before we had comfortably settled the four, for they must fit snugly enough not to wiggle and tip, and yet not so tight as to bind and prevent removal for cleaning purposes. This little stand of natural wood was no sooner finished and mounted on the camp table than its possibilities began to crowd around it. Ferns being the nearest at hand, I crawled over the crumbling bank wall into the Opal Farm meadow and gathered hay-scented, wood, and lady ferns from along the fence line and grouped them loosely in the stand. The effect was magical, a bit of its haunt following the fern indoors.

Next day I gathered in the hemlock woods a basket of the waxy, spotted-leaved pipsissewa, together with spikes and garlands of club moss. I had thought these perfect when steadied by bog moss in a flat, cut-glass dish, but in the birch stump they were entirely at home. If these midsummer wood flowers harmonize so well, how much more charming will be the blossoms of early spring, a season when the white birch is quite the most conspicuous tree in the landscape! Picture dog-tooth violets, spring beauties, bellwort, Quaker-ladies, and great tufts of violets, shading from white to deepest blue, in such a setting! Or, of garden things, poets' narcissus and lilies-of-the-valley!

Other receptacles of a like kind we have in different stages of progress, made of the wood of sassafras, oak, beech, and hackberry, together with several irregular stumps of lichen-covered cedar. Two long limbs with several short side branches Bart has flattened on the back and arranged with picture-hooks, so that they can be bracketed against the frame of the living-room door, opposite the flower-greeting table that I have fashioned after yours. These are to be used for vines, and I shall try to keep this wide, open portal cheerfully garlanded.

The first week of my flower wardenship was a most strenuous one. I use the word reluctantly, but having tried half a dozen others, no equivalent seemed to fit. I had flowers in every room in the house, bedchambers included, using in this connection the cleanest-breathed and longest-lived blossoms possible.

Late as was the sowing, the annuals remaining in the seed bed have begun to yield a glorious crop. The fireplaces were filled with black-eyed Susans from the fields and hollyhocks from an old self-seeded colony at Opal Farm, and every available vase, bowl, and pitcher had something in it. How I laboured! I washed jars, sorted colours, and freshened still passable arrangements of the day before, and all the while I felt sure that Maria was watching me, with an amused twinkle in the tail of her eye!

One day, the middle of last week, the temperature dropped suddenly, and we fled from camp to the house for twenty-four hours, lighted the logs in the hall, and actually settled down to a serious game of whist in the evening, Maria Maxwell, The Man, Bart, and I. Yes, I know how you detest the game, but I—though I am not exactly amused by it—rather like it, for it gives occupation at once for the hands and thoughts and a cover for studying the faces and moods of friends without the reproach of staring.

By the way, The Man has hired half the house from Amos Opie—it was divided several years ago—and established helter-skelter bachelor quarters at Opal Farm. Bart has told him, over and over again, how welcome he is to stay here, under any and all conditions, while he works in the vicinity, but he says that he needs a lot of room for his traps, muddy boots, etc., while Opie, a curious Jack-at-all-trades, gives him his breakfast. I'm wondering if The Man felt that he was intruding upon Maria by staying here, or if she has any Mrs. Grundy ideas and was humpy to him, or even suggested that he would better move up the road. She is quite capable of it!

However, he seems glad enough to drop in to dinner of an evening now, and the two are so delightfully cordial and unembarrassed in their talk, neither yielding a jot to the other, in the resolute spinster and bachelor fashion, that I must conclude that his going was probably a natural happening.

This evening, while Maria and I were waiting together for the men to finish toying with their coffee cups and match-boxes and emerge refreshed from the delightful indolence of the after-dinner smoke, the odour of the flowers—intensified both by dampness and the woodsmoke—was very manifest.

"How do you like your employment?" asked Maria.

"I like the decorative and inventive part of it," I said, thinking into the fire, "but I believe"—and here I hesitated as a chain of peculiar green flame curled about the log and held my attention. "That it is quite as possible to overdo the house decoration with flowers as it is to spoil a nice bit of lawn with too many fantastic flower beds!" Bart broke in quite unexpectedly, coming behind me and raising my face, one hand beneath my chin. "Isn't that what you were thinking, my Lady Lazy?"

"Truly it was, only I never meant to let it pop out so suddenly and rudely," I was forced to confess. "In one way it would seem impossible to have too many flowers about, and yet in another it is unnatural, for are not nature's unconscious effects made by using colour as a central point, a focus that draws the eye from a more sombre and soothing setting?"

"How could we enjoy a sunset that held the whole circle of the horizon at once?" chimed in The Man, suddenly, as if reading my thoughts. "Or twelve moons?" added Bart, laughing.

No, Mrs. Evan, I am convinced by so short a trial as two weeks that the art of arranging flowers for the house is first, your plan of having some to greet the guest as he enters, a bit of colour or coolness in each room where we pause to read or work or chat, and a table garnishing to render æsthetic the aspect and surroundings of the human animal at his feeding time; otherwise, except at special seasons of festivity, a surplus of flowers in the house makes for restlessness, not peace. Two days ago I had thirty-odd vases and jars filled with flowers, and I felt, as I sat down to sew, as if I was trespassing in a bazaar! Also, if there are too many jars of various flowers in one room, it is impossible that each should have its own individuality.

To-day I began my new plan. I put away a part of my jars and vases and deliberately thought out what flowers I would use before gathering them.

The day being overcast though not threatening, merely the trail, as it were, of the storm that had passed, and the den being on the north side of the house and finished in dark woodwork and furniture, I gathered nasturtiums in three shades for it, the deep crimson, orange-scarlet, and canary-yellow, but not too many—a blue-and-white jar of the Chinese "ginger" pattern for one corner of the mantel-shelf, and for the Japanese well buckets, that are suspended from the central hanging lamp by cords, a cascade of blossoms of the same colour still attached to their own fleshy vines and interspersed with the foliage. Strange as it may seem, this little bit of pottery, though of a peculiar deep pink, harmonizes wonderfully well with the barbaric nasturtium colours. There seems to be a kind of magic blended with the form and colour of these buckets, plain and severe in shape, that swing so gracefully from their silken cords, for they give grace to every flower that touches them. When filled with stiff stalks of lilies-of-the-valley or tulips, they have an equally distinguished air as when hung with the bells of columbines or garlands of flowering honeysuckles twisted about the cords climbing quite up to the lamp.

In the hall I placed my tallest green-glass jar upon the greeting table and filled it with long stalks of red and gold Canada lilies from the very bottom of Amos Opie's field, where the damp meadow-grass begins to make way for tussocks and the marshy ground begins.

The field now is as beautiful as a dream; the early grasses have ripened, and above them, literally by the hundreds,—rank, file, regiment, and platoon,—stand these lilies, some stalks holding twenty bells, ranged as regularly as if the will of man had set them there, and yet poised so gracefully that we know at once that no human touch has placed them. I wish that you could have stood with me in the doorway of the camp and looked across that field this morning. Bart declared the sight to be the first extra dividend upon our payment to Amos Opie for leaving the grass uncut.

I left the stalks of the lilies full three feet long and used only their own foliage, together with some broad-leaved grasses, to break the too abrupt edge of the glass. This is a point that must be remembered in arranging flowers, the keeping the relative height and habit of the plant in the mind's eye. These lilies, gathered with short stems and massed in a crowded bunch, at once lose their individuality and become mere little freckled yellow gamins of the flower world.

A rather slender jar or vase also gives an added sense of height; long-stemmed flowers should never be put in a flat receptacle, no matter how adroitly they may be held in place. Only last month I was called upon to admire a fine array of long-stemmed roses that were held in a flat dish by being stuck in wet sand, and even though this was covered by green moss, the whole thing had a painfully artificial and embalmed look, impossible to overcome.

For the living room, which is in quiet green tones and chintz-upholstered wicker furniture, I gathered Shirley poppies. They are not as large and perfectly developed as those I once saw in your garden from fall-sown seed, but they are so delicately tinted and the petals so gracefully winged that it seemed like picking handfuls of butterflies.

Maria Maxwell has shown me how, by looking at the stamens, I can tell if the flower is newly opened, for by picking only such they will last two full days. How lasting are youthful impressions! She remembers all these things, though she has had no very own garden these ten years and more. Will the Infant remember creeping into my cot in these summer mornings, cuddling and being crooned to like a veritable nestling, until her father gains sufficient consciousness to take his turn and delight her by the whistled imitation of a few simple bird songs? Yes, I think so, and I would rather give her this sort of safeguard to keep off harmful thoughts and influences than any worldly wisdom.

The poppies I arranged in my smallest frosted-white and cut-glass vases in two rows on the mantel-shelf, before the quaint old oblong mirror, making it look like a miniature shrine. Celia Thaxter had this way of using them, if I remember rightly, the reflection in the glass doubling the beauty and making the frail things seem alive!

For the library, where oak and blue are the prevailing tints, I filled a silver tankard with a big bunch of blue cornflowers, encircled by the leaves of "dusty miller," and placed it on the desk.

The dining-room walls are of deep dark red that must be kept cool in summer. At all seasons I try to have the table decorations low enough not to oblige us to peer at one another through a green mist, and to-day I made a wreath of hay-scented ferns and ruby-spotted Japan lilies (Speciosum rubrum, the tag says—they were sent as extras with my seeds), by combining two half-moon dishes, and in the middle set a slender, finely cut, flaring vase holding two perfect stems, each bearing half a dozen lily buds and blossoms. These random bulbs are the first lilies of my own planting. There are a few stalks of the white Madonna lilies in the grass of the old garden and a colony of tiger lilies and an upright red lily with different sort of leaves, all clustered at the root, following the tumble-down wall, the rockery to be. I am fascinated by these Japanese lilies and desire more, each stalk is so sturdy, each flower so beautifully finished and set with jewels and then powdered with gold, as it were. Pray tell me something about the rest of the family! Do they come within my range and pocket, think you? The first cost of a fair-sized bed would be considerable, but if they are things that by care will endure, it is something to save up for, when the rose bed is completed—take note of that!

When Bart came home this afternoon, he walked through the rooms before going out and commented on the different flowers, entirely simple in arrangement, and lingered over them, touching and taking pleasure in them in a way wholly different from last week, when each room was a jungle and I was fairly suffering from flower surfeit.

Now I find myself taking note of happy combinations of colour in other people's gardens and along the highways for further experiments. I seem to remember looking over a list of flower combinations and suggestions in your garden book. Will you lend it to me?

By the way, opal effects seem to circle about the place this season—the sunsets, the farm-house windows, and finally that rainy night when we were playing whist, when The Man, taking a pencil from his pocket, pulled out a little chamois bag that, being loose at one end, shed a shower of the unset stones upon the green cloth, where they lay winking and blinking like so many fiery coals.

"Are you a travelling jeweler's shop?" quizzed Bart.

"No," replied The Man, watching the stones where they lay, but not attempting to pick them up; "the opal is my birth stone, and I've always had a fancy for picking them up at odd times and carrying them with me for luck!"

"I thought that they are considered unlucky," said Maria, holding one in the palm of her hand and watching the light play upon it.

"That is as one reads them," said The Man; "to me they are occasionally contradictory, that is all; otherwise they represent adaptation to circumstances, and inexpensive beauty, which must always be a consolation."

Then he gave us each one, "to start a collection," he said. I shall have mine set as a talisman for the Infant. I like this new interpretation of the stone, for to divine beauty in simple things is a gift equal to genius.

Maria, however, insisted upon giving an old-fashioned threepenny bit, kept as a luck penny in the centre of her purse, in exchange. How can any woman be so devoid of even the little sentiment of gifts as she is?

A moment later The Man from Everywhere electrified us by saying, in the most casual manner, "Now that we are on the subject of opals, did I tell you that, being in some strange manner drawn to the place, I have made Opie an offer for the Opal Farm?"

"Good enough! but what for?" exclaimed Bart, nearly exposing a very poor hand.

"How splendid!" I cried, checking an impulse to throw my arms around his neck so suddenly that I shied my cards across the room—"Then the meadow need never be cut again!"

"What a preposterous idea! Did he accept the offer?" jerked Maria Maxwell, with a certain eagerness.

The Man's face, already of a healthy outdoor hue, took a deeper colour above the outline of his closely cropped black beard, which he declined to shave, in spite of prevailing custom.

"I'm afraid my popularity as a neighbour is a minor quality, when even my Lady Lazy makes it evident that her enthusiasm is for meadow weeds and not myself!"

"When would you live there?" asked practical Bart.

"All the time, when I'm not elsewhere!" said The Man. "No, seriously, I want permanent headquarters, a house to keep my traps in, and it can easily be somewhat remodelled and made comfortable. I want to own a resting-place for the soles of my feet when they are tired, and is it strange that I should pitch my tent near two good friends?"

It was a good deal for The Man to say, and instantly there was hand-shaking and back-clapping between Bart and himself, and the game became hopelessly mixed.

As for Maria, she as nearly sniffed audibly at the idea as a well-bred woman could. It is strange, I had almost fancied during the course of the past month, and especially this evening, that The Man's glance, when toward her, held a special approval of a different variety than it carried to Bart and me! If Maria is going to worry him, she shall go back to her flat! I've often heard Bart say that men's feelings are very woundable at forty, while at twenty-five a hurt closes up like water after a pebble has been dropped in it.

Yes, Maria has been rude to The Man, and in my house, too, where she represents me! Anastasia told me! I suppose I really ought not to have listened, but it was all over before I realized what she was saying.

"Yes, mem, for all Miss Marie do be fixed out, so tasty and pleasant like to everybody, and so much chicked up by the country air, she's no notion o' beaus or of troubling wid the men!"

"What do you mean, Anastasia?" said I, in perfect innocence. "Of course Miss Maria is not a young girl to go gadding about!"

"It's not gadding I mean, mem, but here on the porch, one foine night, jest before the last time Mister Blake went off fer good, they was sat there some toime, so still that, says I to meself, 'When they do foind spach, it'll be something worth hearing!'

"'Do I annoy you by staying here? Would you prefer I went elsewhere?' says he, and well I moind the words, for Oi thought an offer was on the road, and as 'twas the nearest I'd been to wan, small wonder I got excoited! Then Miss Marie spoke up, smooth as a knife cutting ice cream,—'To speak frankly,' says she, 'you do not exactly annoy me, but I'd much rather you went elsewhere!' Och, but it broke me heart, the sound of it!"

LIST OF FLOWER COMBINATIONS FOR THE TABLE FROM BARBARA'S GARDEN BOKE

HEAVILY SCENTED FLOWERS, SUCH AS HYACINTHS, LEMON AND AURATUM LILIES, POLYANTHUS NARCISSUS, MAGNOLIAS, LILACS, AND THE LIKE, SHOULD BE AVOIDED.