Old Dan’l is Wroth.
Mr Grayson’s was the best garden for twenty miles round.
The Coleby people said so, and they ought to have known.
But Dan’l Copestake said it was all nonsense. “Might be made a good garden if master wasn’t so close,” he used to say to everybody. “Wants more money spent on it, and more hands kept. How’m I to keep a place like that to rights with only two—me and a lab’rer, under me, and Peter to do the sweeping?”
Keep it to rights or not, it was to Helen Grayson four acres of delight, and she was to blame for a great deal which offended Dan’l Copestake, the head-gardener.
“Papa,” it would be, “did you give orders for that beautiful privet hedge to be cut down!”
“Eh? no, my dear, Copestake said it kept the light off some of those young trees, and I said he might cut it down.”
“Oh, do stop him,” cried Helen. “It will take years to grow up, and this past year it has been delightful, with its sweet-scented blossom and beautiful black berries.”
So it was with scores of things. Helen wanted to see them growing luxuriantly, Dan’l Copestake loved to hash and chop them into miserably cramped “specimints,” as he called them, and the doctor got all the blame.
But what a garden! It was full of old-fashioned flowers in great clumps, many of them growing, to Dan’l’s disgust, down among the fruit and vegetables.