“Box!!” he said in a voice of awe, as if the gods overhearing would be angry. “Where am I to get Box from? And if I was to get Box, Box don’t grow so high,”—he held his hand a mustard seed height from the ground—“not in ten years. It’s awkward stuff, Box, to deal with. In a garden this size that needs an extra man—and plenty of work for a boy too, when all these leaves is about—growing hedges of Box or what not is not possible. Not that I have anything to say against Box, far from it. No. It looks well in some places, but if you was to ask me, sir, I think it’ud be the ruin of this Rosebed.”
Said the robin to me, “The man’s mad.”
I answered quickly, “It was merely a sudden idea of mine.”
He relapsed into silence for a moment. Then he said, “flints.”
I knew it was to be a battle. I hate flints. Nasty, ugly, tiresome eyesores. Gardeners love flints just as many of them love Laurels and Ivy.
A PATH IN A ROSE GARDEN.
I said very rashly, “But where are we to get flints?”
Of course I should have known that he had a cartload of flints up his sleeve. He scraped his boots, walked away, and returned with a jagged thing like one petrified decayed tooth of a mammoth. This he thrust into the ground, and then surveyed it with pride.
“That,” he said, “is something like.”