But to return to my hopefully-growing seeds. I fear they were being left anyway rather longer than was judicious, for one day about the beginning of April it struck me my wooden boxes were very full and the plantlets growing very leggy.
"Why is that?" I asked Griggs. I hated asking Griggs, but there was no one else to ask. After all it seemed impossible but that Griggs, during the forty odd years he had pretended to be a gardener, should not have gathered together some scraps of information concerning plants and their ways.
"They wants pricking out, that's why they're so spindle-shankey. 'Tain't no good asking me for more boxes, I ain't got no more; and you can't put 'em out in the open neither—leastways, they'll die if you do."
"Of course not," I said with all the knowledge I possessed in my tone. "But we must have boxes. They can be knocked up, can't they?"
"Not without wood, they can't. And just look at all them seeds wot you've sowed. Why, they wants a sight o' boxes now."
It was a dilemma, but Jim revived my faint spirits.
There were boxes—old winecases—in the cellar, he said. Jim knew every nook and cranny of the house; he would just ferret them out; no one would miss them. Jim never asked leave, for experience had taught him that a demand occasions a curious rise in the value of an article absolutely unknown to the possessor before it was required by someone else. And Griggs knocked them together, for Jim explained we had to let the fellow try his hand occasionally.
We filled the new boxes with a little heavier diet than the baby seeds had enjoyed, good mould from under some shrubbery, and then carefully separated each stem; and carrying out Nature's law of the survival of the fittest, I placed the most promising in the new environment.