“I will do it myself.”
“Fight it out,” said the robin.
More or less in silence, and really in excellent tempers, we finished the trench that was to receive the cinders and ashes.
I washed the tiles. There were exactly ninety of them required. I started to wash them in the cold water of a stable bucket, and I regarded each one as a thing of beauty as I did it. After having done forty I began to think it would be a good thing to give prisoners to do to teach them discipline. After seventy, I decided to recommend that particular form of torture to some Chinese official. By the time I had finished I felt that some medal should be struck to commemorate the event.
The gardener, at the close of that day, looked at my heap of tiles.
I said, “I have finished them.”
He replied, “I was just coming to lend a hand.”
To which, as I was not going to let the sun go down upon my wrath, I answered, “Thank you.”
I think an ash-heap is the most desolate object I know. The dreary remains of burnt-out fires make a melancholy sight, but I remember that as a child that corner of the garden where stood the heaps of ashes and ancient rubbish was as the mines of Eldorado to me. Here, if one dug deeply enough, one found pieces of broken pottery, in themselves equal, by power of imagination, to any discovery of Roman remains. To the whitened bones I found I gave names, building from them adventures more lurid than those of Captain Kydd. To the ashes I gave gold and jewels, delving as if in a mine, sifting, with childlike seriousness, the heap of fire slack, and coming on some bright bit of glass that shone for me like a kingly diamond, I held it to the light and renewed the ardour of my soul in its gleaming rays. After all, are not pieces of broken glass as beautiful as many jewels if they are self-discovered and lit by the light of joy? That corner of the garden, hidden by shrubs, by low-growing nut trees and shaded by ancient Elms, has been for me the Forest of Arden, of Sherwood, the deeps of the Jungle, an ambush, a hiding-place, a tree covered island, each in its turn absolutely satisfying to my mind. The sun’s rays shooting down through the branches have found me seated, dirty, dishevelled, but incomparably happy,—a King with an ash heap for a throne.
To an ash heap, then, I repaired on the following day, there to gather loads of cinders and slack for my garden path. Already in my mind the Roses bloomed by the path side; the tiles, evenly set, were leaned against by blue-eyed Violas; Carnations waved gorgeous heads at my feet.