"You 'tend to it! you 'tend to it!" he cried testily. "I've got all I can do to git them Miller gals' pieces into shape so 't they can sow a few seeds."
But one morning he sought out Wilfred, mending a gap in his own orchard wall by the road.
"Wilfred," said Gardener Jim, "have you 'tended to Annie's gardin?"
He had laid down his hoe and put up a foot on a stone in good position for talk.
Wilfred dropped his crowbar and came forward.
"Why, no," said he, irritated, he hardly knew why, as if by a call to a forgotten task. "Nobody's asked me to 'tend to it."
Jim stood for a moment looking through the tree-spaces, and then his gaze came back to his nephew, and Wilfred, with a start, realized that he had never before had the chance to look into uncle Jim's eyes. Now he found them direct and rather stern.
"Wilfred," said Gardener Jim, "don't you be a 'tarnal fool."
Wilfred said nothing, but immediately, he could not tell why, he seemed to be looking upon a picture of Annie standing among the flowers in her little plain dress. His heart was beating faster, and he said to himself that, after all, it would be sort of nice if Annie would come home. Gardener Jim was speaking laboriously, as if he dragged out conclusions he had perhaps reached long ago and had not yet compared with any one.
"There's a time for everything. There's a time to graft a tree an' a time to cut it down. Well, it's your time o' life to make a 'tarnal fool o' yourself. Don't ye do it. If you do, like 's not when you're my age you'll be all soul alone, like me, an' goin' round 'tendin' to other folks's gardins."