“Well, why one flower’s blue and another pink. Man and boy I’ve worked in gardens, and with good head-men over me too when I was learning—Scotchmen and all—but I never heard about that. Never even wondered about it. ‘So as to look prettier in nosegays’ was all I could say; but it must go deeper than that. I told her to ask you, you being a gentleman of learning, but she says, ‘No, no, Briggs, it’s what a gardener ought to know,’ and she’s right.
“Here’s some more nuts of hers to crack—‘Why do some flowers have scent and others don’t?’ ‘Who discovered that potatoes are good to eat?’ ‘Who began to put horse-radish with beef?’ ‘Why are butterflies called butterflies?’ Really, sir, you ought to take her on, she makes me seem that ignorant. She won’t ask me the things I do know. The funny part of it is,” Briggs went on, “she doesn’t want to have a garden of her own. Some children are mad about that, but she doesn’t care. All she wants is to walk about among the flowers, or stand by me, and watch and watch.”
And off he went.
He came back a moment later. “It would be very good of you,” he said, “to try and find out why butterflies are called butterflies. My missis wants to know too.”
I remember another of Briggs’ stories of Rose. “The other day,” he said—this was when Rose was about six—“she brought a tooth—the one that you gave her a shilling for if she didn’t cry when she went to have it pulled—and what do you think? She wanted me to plant it for her. Plant it! And what for? So as it would grow into a soldier, as it did in some book they’d been reading to her.
“‘A soldier!’ I said, wishing to tease her a little, ‘why a soldier, I should like to know? Why not a gardener?’
“‘Pooh, gardeners!’ she said. ‘That wouldn’t be any fun. Besides, teeth don’t grow into gardeners anyway, they grow into soldiers’; and she comes out every morning and evening to water it.”
Rose’s want of interest in work of any kind extended to games. Her boredom when her father and I were at croquet or billiards was abysmal, and I could never induce her to persevere with a mallet. Her playground was the world, and her play was to be in it, and see it, and, I doubt not, speculate as to its peculiarities. She liked to have stories read to her, but she liked better to invent them for herself and relate them to herself as she walked about, outdoors or in. But when she could get one’s whole attention, which is the too-often-frustrated desire of most children, she was happiest. A walk with me in the garden when I was “ab-so-loot-ly” idle, without scissors or spud or preoccupation, was one of her special treats; the tendency of grown up people to let their eyes wander towards weeds or suckers or green fly being among her heavy crosses.
But her crosses were few. She must have been one of the first children for whom those in authority made the world primarily a happy place. It is more or less the rule now, but it was exceptional then.
Like most little girls, she was interested in young creatures: more than interested, enchanted by them. The finest horse in the world—Iroquois, say, who had just won the Derby—the finest cow, the finest sheep, left her calm; but she trembled with rapture on catching sight of a foal or a calf or a lamb. If the lamb had a black face she screamed with joy. As for puppies and kittens, she lost her head completely over them. Again and again I have had to stop, when she has been on my rounds with me, while she got down in order to embrace one of these impostors, and the uglier the kitten was the more she loved it. I could never break her of the habit—an extremely insanitary one, I am convinced—of hugging stray kittens.