Well, they talked it over cautiously for a few hours; for captain MacKellar was a hard man at a bargain, and he would not agree to give them a passage under two pound a head. At last, however, negotiations were concluded, the men got aboard the Bonnie Doon, and piloted her through the channel. They reached the Clyde in safety, and Captain Mac-Kellar remarked,—
“Weel, ma freens, I'm in hopes that ye'll pay me ower the siller this day.”
“Ay, ye maun be in the quare swithers till ye see the siller; but we'll hand it ower, certes,” said the passengers. “In the meantime, we'd tak' the leeberty o' callin' your attention to a wee bit contra-claim that we hae japped doon on a bit slip o' paper. It's three poon nine for Harbour Dues that ye owe us, Captain MacKellar, and twa poon ten for pilotage—it's compulsory at yon island, so 'tis, so mebbe ye'll mak' it convenient to hand us ower the differs when we land. Ay, Douglas MacKellar, ma mon, ye shouldna try to get the better o' Brither-Scots!”
Captain MacKellar was a God-fearing man, but he said, “Dom!”
CHAPTER THE TWENTY-FOURTH
Whatever my garden may be, I think I can honestly claim for it that it has no educational value. The educational garden is one in which all the different orders and classes and groups and species and genera are displayed in such a way as to make no display, but to enable an ordinary person in the course of ten or twelve years to become a botanist. Botany is the syntax of the garden. A man may know everything about syntax and yet never become a poet; and a garden should be a poem.
I remember how a perfect poem of a garden was translated into the most repulsively correct prose by the exertions of a botanist. It was in a semi-public pleasure ground maintained by subscribers of a guinea each, and of course it was administered by a Committee. After many years of failure, an admirable head-gardener was found—a young and enthusiastic man with eye for design and an appreciation of form as well as colour. Within a short space of time he turned a commonplace pleasure-ground into a thing of beauty; and, not content with making the enormous domed conservatory and the adjoining hothouse a blaze of colour and fragrance, he attacked an old worn-out greenhouse and, without asking for outside assistance, transformed it into a natural sub-tropical landscape—palms and cacti and giant New Zealand ferns, growing amid rocky surroundings, and wonderful lilies filling a large natural basin, below an effective cascade. The place was just what such a place should be, conveying the best idea possible to have of a moist corner of a tropical forest, only without the overwhelming shabbiness which was the most striking note of every tropical forest I have ever seen in a natural condition. In addition to its attractiveness in this respect, it would have become a source of financial profit to the subscribers, for the annual “thinning out” of its superfluous growths would mean the stocking of many private conservatories.
On the Committee of Management, however, there was one gentleman whose aim in life was to be regarded by his fellow-tradesmen as a great botanist: he was, to a great botanist, what the writer of the cracker mottoes is to a great poet, or the compiler of the puzzle-page of a newspaper is to a great mathematician; but he was capable of making a fuss and convincing a bunch of tradesmen that making a fuss is a proof of superiority; and that botany and beauty are never to be found in association. He condemned the tropical garden as an abomination, because it was impossible that a place which could give hospitality to a growth of New Zealand fern, Phormium Hookeri, should harbour a sago palm Metroxylon Elatum, which was not indigenous to New Zealand; and then he went on to talk about the obligations of the place to be educational and not ornamental, showing quite plainly that to be botanical should be the highest aim of any one anxious for the welfare of his country.