"You don't want heat for them?"
"Oh, no, they ought to be hardened, you see."
"And it's only at night, or against heavy rains, that they want protecting?"
"That's all."
"Well, then, I have it!" And he had it, the germ of the brilliant idea that, with Jim's assistance and mine, and Griggs's for actual manual labour, gradually evolved into an impromptu frame and saved us even the making of new boxes.
This was the plan of action.
We cleared a space in the little yard where the frame lived, and the manure heap in one corner, and one sunny border which held lettuce and I intended should hold my plantlets later on. We made first a bed of cinders (this for drainage), then a layer of manure (this for heat), then good mould, and all were enclosed with four strong planks, and in this protected spot we pricked out our nurslings. At night they were covered with a plank or two and some sacking, and this also protected them during any very heavy rains, until they grew strong enough to weather them. The boxes already pricked out we protected in like manner, only making no special bed for them.
It became truly a delight to see how day by day those tiny sprigs of green grew and prospered, and to watch the development of the various leaves. The pretty crinkly little round leaves of the polyanthus, the neat spiky twig of the marigold and tagetes, the sturdy, even-growing antirrhinum with pale green stalks for white, and yellow and rich brown for the red variety, and the trim, three-cornered leaves of the nasturtium, each after its kind, very wonderful when we realise all that potentiality enclosed in a pin's point of a seed, and needing no difference of treatment to produce either zinnia or lobelia.
I made all the Others, and everyone else too, walk round my nursery and dilated on the promising appearance of my children.
"Wonderfully neat! but how tiny they all are. Do you mean to say you expect those little things to flower this year? Why, it is like asking a baby of six months old to ride a bicycle!" said one of the Others.