Ever since we came to California we
have been lucky about gardeners. I don't mean as horticulturists, but from the far more important standard of picturesqueness. Of course no one could equal Garibaldi with the romance of a distant relationship to the patriot and the grand manner no rake or hoe could efface, but Banksleigh had his own interest. He was an Englishman with pale blue eyes that always seemed to be looking beyond our horizon into space. There was something rather poetic and ethereal about him. Perhaps he didn't eat enough, or it may have been the effect of "New Thought," in one of the fifty-seven varieties of which he was a firm believer. He told me that his astral colors were red and blue, and that a phrenologist had told him that a bump on the back of his head indicated that he ought never to buy mining stock.
With the same instinct that undid Bluebeard's and Lot's wives he had tried it, and is once more back at his job of gardening with an increased respect for phrenology.
I have a grudge against phrenologists myself. I had a relative who went to one when he was a young man, and was told that he had a wonderful baritone voice that he ought to cultivate. Up to that time he had only played the flute, but afterwards he sang every evening through a long life.
It distressed Banksleigh to see me lying about in hammocks on the verandah. He usually managed to give the vines in my neighborhood extra attention—like Garibaldi, he was a confirmed pruner. He told me that he wished I would take up New Thought, and was sure that if I
thought strong I'd be strong. I wonder? One summer, lying in bed in a hospital where the heat was terrific, I found myself repeating over and over:
"Sabrina fair, Listen where thou art sitting, Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave,"
and finding it far more cooling than iced orange juice. Was not I proving Banksleigh's contention? I was thinking cool and I was cool. In his own case New Thought seemed to work. He always looked ready to give up forever, and yet he never did.
California is full of people with queer quirks and they aren't confined to gardeners. I haven't had a hair-dresser who wasn't occult or psychic or something, from the Colonial Dame with premonitions to the last one, who had both inspirations