As far back as Polly could remember, Uncle Peter had been as much a part of the garden at Glenwood as the old elms that bordered the garden, and she had always considered him a remarkable authority on all subjects. In fact Uncle Peter justified her opinion of him.
He was not tall and stately like Aunty Welcome, but a little, stoop-shouldered old man, with a face like a wrinkled russet apple, and it wore a perpetual smile. Polly used to believe sincerely, when she was a little girl, that when Uncle Peter walked along the garden paths, all the flowers turned their heads and bowed to him deferentially.
To-day, as she watched him transplanting seedlings along the borders, she asked thoughtfully:
“Uncle Peter, do you know what sort of flowers grow out in Wyoming?”
“Whar’s dat, Mis’ Polly?” asked Uncle Peter, gently. “I don’t jest recollect any sech locality.”
“It’s ’way out west, and kind of northwest, too, up next to the two Dakotas.”
“Oh, suttinly, suttinly. I s’pose geraniums mought grow dar. Dey’ll mostly take a holt any ole place. Dey’ll grow upside downside, geraniums will. Maybe pansies grow dar, too, and phloxes and most any no-account plant dat ain’t perticklar.”
“Do you think so?” Polly pondered. Her only impression of Wyoming was a place filled with mountain ranges, and vast wastes of sage brush, and most of all, a place that was wholly wild—wild flowers, wild animals. And yet, come to think of it, Jean Murray did not act like a ranch girl who had run wild. Polly veered to a new tack.
“Did you ever see Miss Diantha Calvert, Uncle Peter?”
“I suttinly did.” Uncle Peter always used his own thumb to make nests in the soft earth for his baby seedlings, and the thumb went in a bit more forcibly as he spoke. “She’s stood and watched me work in dis yere very garden, when she wasn’t much taller’n you be, Mis’ Polly, and I was a lil’ shaver like Stoney.”