"Not so but I can mend it up again," said Phil. "I didn't mean a real garden though—only a bed for flowers and maybe some radishes or the like. I can dig up the ground and mend the fence and plant my seeds before it's time to take the cow out, and then they'll be growing while we're sleeping. Mr. Regan said he'd show me how to plant the seed. I'd like to be a gardener when I'm grown-up, granny. I think it is so nice all among the trees and plants; better than working in the dusty, woolly carpet factory, or in the hat factory among the dyestuffs and smells."
"Thrue for you, dear; I'd like it better for ye. Them factories isn't very healthy, they say."
"And it's a good trade too," continued Phil. "Mr. Regan gets large wages I know, and Mrs. Barnard thinks everything of him."
"And well she may. There, go and dig in your garden if you like."
"Granny's got something on her mind," thought Phil as he climbed to the garret where he slept, and turned over a great heap of mostly useless lumber to find the tools he wanted. "I wonder what it is. Here's the things at last—spade, rake, and hoe—good luck to me. I'll want the hatchet too, so I'd best take it along."
Phil would have liked to go at once to digging, but his own common sense told him that there would be no use in making a garden for the neighbors' pigs to run over, so he set to work on the fence first. It was hard, tiresome work for one not very large boy, and more than once he was tempted to give it up. But the thought of his flower seeds and of what Mr. Regan would say gave him courage. He only stopped long enough to cook his own and granny's dinner, and by night he had made a pretty good fence and dug up part of his ground. It was the hardest day's labor of his life, but he felt rewarded when Mr. Regan looked over his work and declared that he had made a very good beginning.
"I'll give you a bit of a vine to run up on the rock here, and some morning-glories and scarlet beans. Oh! You'll have a fine garden if you take pains. But then you must remember that a garden is a thing that can't be just made and left. You've got to work at it every day, and pull up the weeds just as fast es they show themselves, or else they'll get ahead of you.
"Well, Mrs. O'Connor, I've looked at the cow all over, and I think I can in conscience advise Mrs. Barnard to take her at the price. She is a nice creature, and we know the stock she comes of. I'll let you know in two or three days."
"Why, granny, do you mean to sell the cow?" asked Phil, in great surprise.
He knew how much granny thought of Crummie, and with how much reason. Crummie was a nearly pure-blooded Jersey cow. Her mother had been given to granny many years before by a lady whom she had nursed in a very bad fever, and was of the best breed. Crummie might have been sold many times over, but granny had always refused to part with her.