That's how it went. But he didn't like it.
"Then there's other gardens that every one can see, both market-gardens and flower-gardens. Cap'n Ellis told me he knew a man once that wore a cauliflower in his buttonhole, whenever he went to chapel, and thought it was a rose. Leastways, he thought that every one else thought it was a rose. Kind of an orstrich he must have been. But that wasn't the way with Cap'n Ellis. Every one could see his garden, though he had a nice big hedge round three sides of it, and it wasn't more than three-quarters of an acre. Right on the edge of the white chalk coast it was; and his little six-room cottage looked like a piece of the white chalk itself.
"But he was a queer old chap, and he always would have it that nobody could really see his garden. I used to take him a few mackerel occasionally—he liked 'em for his supper—and he'd walk in his garden with me for half an hour at a time. Then, just as I'd be going he'd give a little smile and say, 'Well, you haven't seen my garden yet! You must come again.'
"'Haven't seen your garden,' I'd say. 'I've been looking at it this half hour an' more!'
"'Once upon a time, there was a man that couldn't see a joke,' he'd say. Then he'd go off chuckling, and swinging his mackerel against the hollyhocks.
"Funny little old chap he was, with a pinched white face, and a long nose, and big gray eyes, and fluffy white hair for all the world like swans' down. But he'd been a good seaman in his day.
"He'd sit there, in his porch, with his spyglass to his eye, looking out over his garden at the ships as they went up and down the Channel. Then he'd lower his glass a little to look at the butterflies, fluttering like little white sails over the clumps of thrift at the edge of the cliff, and settling on the little pink flowers. Very pretty they was too. He planted them there at the end of his garden, which ran straight down from his cottage to the edge of the cliff. He said his wife liked to see them nodding their pink heads against the blue sea, in the old days, when she was waiting for him to come home from one of his voyages. 'Pink and blue,' he says, 'is a very pretty combination.' They matched her eyes and cheeks, too, as I've been told. But she's been dead now for twenty-five years or more.
"He had just one little winding path through the garden to the edge of the cliff; an' all the rest, at the right time of the year, was flowers. He'd planted a little copse of fir trees to the west of it, so as to shelter the flowers; and every one laughed at him for doing it. The sea encroaches a good many yards along this coast every year, and the cliffs were crumbling away with every tide. The neighbors told him that, if he wanted a flower-garden, he'd better move inland.
"'It was a quarter of a mile inland,' he says, 'when Polly and me first came to live here; and it hasn't touched my garden yet. It never will touch it,' he says, 'not while I'm alive. There are good break-waters down below, and it will last me my time. Perhaps the trees won't grow to their full height, but I shan't be here to see,' he says, 'and it's not the trees I'm thinking about. It's the garden. They don't have to be very tall to shelter my garden. As for the sea,' he says, 'it's my window, my bay-window, and I hope you see the joke. If I was inland, with four hedges around my garden, instead of three,' he says, 'it would be like living in a house without a window. Three hedges and a big blue bay-window, that's the garden for me,' he says.
"And so he planted it full of every kind of flowers that he could grow. He had sweet Williams, and larkspurs, and old man's beard, and lavender, and gilly-flowers, and a lot of them old-fashioned sweet-smelling flowers, with names that he used to say were like church-bells at evening, in the old villages, out of reach of the railway-lines.