The son obeyed, folded it up and handed it back, saying quietly,—
“Well, dad, do you intend to go?”
To obtain ready cash and good dinners, Willie Wilde, when on the staff of a great London newspaper was ready to descend to any scheming and any meanness. But the descriptive column that he wrote of the sittings of the Parnell Commission day after day could not be surpassed for cleverness and insight. He would lounge into the Court at any time he pleased and remain for an hour or so, rarely longer, and he spent the rest of the day amusing himself and flushing himself with brandies and soda at the expense of his friends. He usually began to write his article between eleven and twelve at night.
Such were these meteoric brothers before the centrifugal force due to their revolutionary instinct sent them flying into space.
But one handful of the meteoric dust of the conversation of either was worth all the humour of the great Victorian punsters.
CHAPTER THE SIXTH
From the foregoing half-dozen pages it is becoming pretty clear that a Garden of Peace may also be a Garden of Memories. But I am sure that one of the greatest attractions of garden life to a man who has stepped out of a busy world—its strepitumque virumque, is that it compels him to look forward, while permitting him to look back. The very act of dropping a seed into the soil is prospective. To see things growing is stimulating, whether they are children or other flowers. One has no time to think how one would order one's career, avoiding the mistakes of the past, if one got a renewal of one's lease of life, for in a garden we are ever planning for the future; but these rustling leaves of memory are useful as a sort of mulch for the mind.
And the garden has certainly grown since I first entered it ten years ago. It was originally to be referred to in the singular, but now it must be thought of in the plural. It was a garden, now it is gardens; and whether I have succeeded or not my experience compels me to believe that to aim at the plural makes for success. Two gardens, each of thirty feet square, are infinitely better than one garden of sixty. I am sure of that to-day, but it took me some time to find it out. A garden to be distinctive must have distinct features, like every other thing of life.