"And they all had a meaning to him which others didn't know. You might walk with him for a whole summer's afternoon in his garden, but it seemed as if his flowers kept the sweetest part of their scents for old Cap'n Ellis. He'd pick one of them aromatic leaves, and roll it in his fingers, and put it to his nose and say 'Ah,' like as if he was talking to his dead sweetheart.
"'It's a strange thing,' he'd say, 'but when she was alive, I was away at sea for fully three parts of the year. We always talked of the time when I'd retire from the sea. We thought we'd settle down together in our garden and watch the ships. But, when that time came, it was her turn to go away, and it's my turn to wait. But there's a garden where we meet,' he'd say, 'and that's the garden you've never seen.'
"There was one little patch, on the warmest and most sheltered side that he called his wife's garden; and it was this that I thought he meant. It was just about as big as her grave, and he had little clusters of her favorite flowers there—rosemary, and pansies and Canterbury bells, and her name Ruth, done very neat and pretty in Sussex violets. It came up every year in April, like as if the garden was remembering.
"Parson considered that Cap'n Ellis was a very interesting man.
"'He's quite a philosopher,' he said to me one day; and I suppose that was why the old chap talked so queer at times.
"One morning, after the war broke out, I'd taken some mackerel up to Cap'n Ellis.
"'Are you quite sure they're fresh,' he said, the same as he always did, though they were always a free gift to him. But he meant no offense.
"'Fresh as your own lavender,' I says, and then we laughs as usual, and sat down to look at the ships, wondering whether they were transports, or Red Cross, or men-of-war, as they lay along the horizon. Sometimes we'd see an air-plane. They used to buzz up and down that coast all day; and Cap'n Ellis would begin comparing it through his glass with the dragon flies that flickered over his gilly-flowers. There was a southwest wind blowing in from the sea over his garden, and it brought us big puffs of scent from the flowers.
"'Hour after hour,' he says, 'day after day, sometimes for weeks I've known the southwest wind to blow like that. It's the wind that wrecked the Armada,' he says, 'and, though it comes gently to my garden, you'd think it would blow all the scents out of the flowers in a few minutes. But it don't,' he says. 'The more the wind blows, the more sweetness they give out,' he says. 'Have you ever considered,' he says, 'how one little clump of wild thyme will go on pouring its heart out on the wind? Where does it all come from?'
"I was always a bit awkward when questions like that were put to me; so—just to turn him off like—I says 'Consider the lilies of the field.'