Before supper I was allowed to help Mr. Bent with a garden hose on the grass; and while we were at work a man from next-door looked over the wall and wished Mr. Bent “good-evening” and asked for some advice. Seeing me, he told me the story of Mr. Bent’s little boy and the cocoanut chips for the third time; then he explained to Mr. Bent that his sweet peas were curling up rather oddly and said that he would thank him to go and have a look at them.
“Good Lord, the peas a failure!” said Mr. Bent; then with his usual kindness he instantly hastened to see if anything could be done. When he returned I could see that he was troubled.
“His peas have failed,” he said. “It is one of those disasters that come upon even good gardeners sometimes. Not that Mason is a good gardener, or, in fact, a gardener at all in the real sense. I don’t know what has happened to his peas—the trouble is below ground and might be one of five different things; but all is over with the peas. I have told him to give up hope about them. I may be able to spare him some annuals later.”
Mrs. Bent, who was a most perfect woman for a gardener’s wife, insisted on picking me a bunch of good and sweet flowers before I went away, and then, just as I was going, Mr. Bent’s brother-in-law walked past the gate and stopped to ask a horticultural question. He was a beginner, but such was Mr. Bent’s fire and genius in these matters that he inspired everybody with his own passion for the science and, as he truly said, no one could know him intimately without sooner or later becoming a gardener.
I am sure I was full of enthusiastic joy about it after supper, and if my Aunt Augusta had had enough garden to grow a blade of grass, I should have planted one. Even as it was, I planned a box for bulbs and things during the next autumn.
Mr. Bent’s brother-in-law happened to be going to the tobacconist’s, and he walked as far as the station with me after he had bought half a pound of coarse tobacco to fumigate his greenhouse, which was bursting with green-fly and other pests. Thus I heard the story of Mr. Bent’s little boy and the cocoanut chips for the fourth time, and it was rather instructive in its way to find how the fun of it had waned. In fact, such was my feeling to the story, that I didn’t even tell it to Aunt Augusta when I got home; though, coming fresh to her, it might have faintly amused her.
As an example of the poem that I had written with Dicky Travers, I may here quote the verse upon Mr. Bent. It ran as follows:
“A middle-aged wonder called Bent,
Made the deuce of a garden in Kent,
And his roses and lilies