"'Ah,' he says, turning to me with his eyes shining. 'That's the way to look at it.' I heard him murmuring another text under his breath, 'Come, thou south, and blow upon my garden.' And he shook hands with me when I said good-bye, as if I'd shown him my feelings, which made me feel I wasn't treating him right, for I'd only said the first thing that came into my mind, owing to my awkwardness at such times.
"Well, it was always disturbing me to think what might happen to Cap'n Ellis, if one day he should find his garden slipping away to the beach. It overhung quite a little already; and there had been one or two big falls of chalk a few hundred yards away. Some said that the guns at sea were shaking down the loose boulders.
"Of course, he was an old man now, three score years and ten, at least; and my own belief was that if his garden went, he would go with it. The parish council was very anxious to save a long strip of the cliff adjoining his garden, because it was their property; and they'd been building a stone wall along the beach below to protect it from the high tide. But they were going to stop short of Cap'n Ellis's property, because of the expense, and he couldn't afford to do it himself. A few of us got together in the Plough and tried to work out a plan of carrying on the wall, by mistake, about fifteen feet further, which was all it needed. We'd got the foreman on our side, and it looked as if we should get it done at the council's expense after all, which was hardly honest, no doubt, in a manner of speaking, though Cap'n Ellis knew nothing about it.
"But the end came in a way that no wall could have prevented, though it proved we were right about the old man having set his heart in that garden. David Copper, the shepherd, saw the whole thing. It happened about seven o'clock of a fine summer morning, when the downs were all laid out in little square patches, here a patch of red clover, and there a patch of yellow mustard, for all the world like a crazy quilt, only made of flowers, and smelling like Eden garden itself for the dew upon them.
"It was all still and blue in the sky, and the larks going up around the dew-ponds and bursting their pretty little hearts for joy that they was alive, when, just as if the shadow of a hawk had touched them, they all wheeled off and dropped silent.
"Pretty soon, there was a whirring along the coast, and one of them air-planes came up, shining like silver in the morning sun. Copper didn't pay much attention to it at first, for it looked just as peaceable as any of our own, which he thought it was. Then he sees a flash, in the middle of Cap'n Ellis's garden, and the overhung piece, where the little clumps of thrift were, goes rumbling down to the beach, like as if a big bag of flour had been emptied over the side. The air-plane circled overhead, and Copper thinks it was trying to hit the coast-guard station, which was only a few score yards away, though nobody was there that morning but the coast-guard's wife, and the old black figurehead in front of it, and there never was any guns there at any time.
"The next thing Copper saw was Cap'n Ellis running out into what was left of his garden, with his night-shirt flapping around him, for all the world like a little white sea-swallow. He runs down with his arms out, as if he was trying to catch hold of his garden an' save it. Copper says he never knew whether the old man would have gone over the edge of the cliff or not. He thinks he would, for he was running wildly. But before he reached the edge there was another flash and, when the smoke had cleared, there was no garden or cottage or Cap'n Ellis at all, but just another big bite taken out of the white chalk coast.
"We found him under about fifteen ton of it down on the beach. The curious thing was that he was all swathed and shrouded from head to foot in the flowers of his garden. They'd been twisted all around him, lavender, and gilly-flowers, and hollyhocks, so that you'd think they were trying to shield him from harm. P'raps they've all gone with him to one of them invisible gardens he used to talk about, where he was going to meet his dead sweetheart.
"They buried him on the sunny side of the churchyard. You can see a bit of blue sea between the yew trees from where he lies, so he's got his window still; and there's a very appropriate inscription on his tombstone:
"Awake, O north wind, and come, thou south: Blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow forth."