"I have been so busy, Jim, and it isn't my department proper. Let us bike over and ask the Master if it is too late. Griggs doesn't really know; he generally repeats what I tell him."
"He knows enough not to do things, does Griggs. I have found that out. He is a champion skulker."
Jim was very despondent, but a good spin along the hard road, with the bright sun that late autumn sometimes sees, raised his spirits.
The Master was in his garden, and oh! how neat and brushed up and ready for its sleeping-time looked his garden. Not empty or dead, but intentionally tucked up and ready for the snowy counterpane, and protected from the biting blast.
It was late, he said, but the weather still held up; we might try taking up one at a time and replacing it so that it should not take cold.
Jim took the directions with great attention.
"I am going to boss this, Mary; you said it wasn't your department."
The way he worked and ordered about Griggs and the coachman, summoned to give his unwilling help, promised well for his future as an admiral. The whole roots of the young pear tree were dug up with the greatest care; the tap-root, there it was sure enough, and all the vitality of the tree going gaily to swell its dimensions, was cut away, and then it was raised into a well-doctored hole, with a broad slab-like stone under it to cut short any further aspirations after such a root again, and all other branch roots carefully spread out to encourage growth and general productiveness.
Jim worked himself and his men, and also the Young Man, hard; I was an admiring onlooker until the operation was finished and the tree standing up quite firm again. Then, as Jim was bent on yet another, and refused to think it too late, I wandered down my lime-tree walk, where snowdrops were now hidden. I had collected ferns there and more primroses, and clumps of foxgloves on the sunniest side, just where they would catch the eye from the garden.