“Won’t you recite some of your poetry to me, Cousin Jimmy?” asked Emily eagerly.
“When the spirit moves me I will. It’s no use to ask me when the spirit don’t move me.”
“But how am I to know when the spirit moves you, Cousin Jimmy?”
“I’ll begin of my own accord to recite my compositions. But I’ll tell you this—the spirit generally moves me when I’m boiling the pigs’ potatoes in the fall. Remember that and be around.”
“Why don’t you write your poetry down?”
“Paper’s too scarce at New Moon. Elizabeth has some pet economies and writing paper of any kind is one of them.”
“But haven’t you any money of your own, Cousin Jimmy?”
“Oh, Elizabeth pays me good wages. But she puts all my money in the bank and just doles out a few dollars to me once in a while. She says I’m not fit to be trusted with money. When I came here to work for her she paid me my wages at the end of the month and I started for Shrewsbury to put it in the bank. Met a tramp on the road—a poor, forlorn creature without a cent. I gave him the money. Why not? I had a good home and a steady job and clothes enough to do me for years. I s’pose it was the foolishest thing I ever did—and the nicest. But Elizabeth never got over it. She’s managed my money ever since. But come you now, and I’ll show you my garden before I have to go and sow turnips.”
The garden was a beautiful place, well worthy Cousin Jimmy’s pride. It seemed like a garden where no frost could wither or rough wind blow—a garden remembering a hundred vanished summers. There was a high hedge of clipped spruce all around it, spaced at intervals by tall lombardies. The north side was closed in by a thick grove of spruce against which a long row of peonies grew, their great red blossoms splendid against its darkness. One big spruce grew in the center of the garden and underneath it was a stone bench, made of flat shore stones worn smooth by long polish of wind and wave. In the southeast corner was an enormous clump of lilacs, trimmed into the semblance of one large drooping-boughed tree, gloried over with purple. An old summer house, covered with vines, filled the southwest corner. And in the northwest corner there was a sun-dial of grey stone, placed just where the broad red walk that was bordered with striped grass, and picked out with pink conchs, ran off into Lofty John’s bush. Emily had never seen a sun-dial before and hung over it enraptured.