One day when spring weather was beginning, and when even Daisy Bank looked a degree less dismal, Marjorie found a friend. As she passed one of the tumble-down cottages, she noticed an old man who was coming out of it with a rose-tree in his arms, and then she saw that a row of similar pots stood in the sunshine against the discoloured wall of the house. The roses were just coming into leaf, and she noticed that the old man was bending lovingly over them, loosening the soil near their stems, and giving each of them some water from a jug which was standing on the doorstep. Marjorie felt that at last she had found something in Daisy Bank at which it was pleasant to look. She went up to the old man and admired his roses, and he showed them to her with great pride, telling her the name and the colour of each.
"Would you like to see my garden, miss?" he asked.
He took her through the kitchen, which was quite clean, although bare of paint and whitewash, and led her to the back of his cottage. There he showed her his lawn, a tiny strip of green about three feet long and two feet broad, covered with grass. This he watered daily, to keep it from being blackened by the smoke-laden atmosphere, and kept it short by cutting it every evening with a pair of scissors. He was intensely proud of it, however, and of a row of hardy plants which were leading a struggling existence under the wall of the house. London Pride was, perhaps, the only one which did not appear to be depressed by its surroundings, and which might justly have changed its name to Daisy Bank Pride.
But the old man was proud of them all, and beamed with delight when Marjorie stooped to examine them. That tiny garden was the joy of his heart, as dear to him as the lovely home garden had been to her, and quite as beautiful in his eyes.
"It's a wonder that anything will grow here," she said.
"Ay, it's unlikely soil; but the Lord's plants do thrive sometimes in that."
"Yes," said Marjorie, for she did not quite see what he meant.
"There was old Dan'el in Babylon, and Obadiah, him as lived in Jezebel's time, and there was saints in Nero's household. They had bad soil, all of 'em, but they was faithful 'trees of the Lord's planting,' that He might be glorified."
And then Marjorie felt that she had found a friend. Old Enoch would have been stamped as an ignorant man by many, but he knew his Bible well, and could repeat much of it by heart. It was his daily study, and he was taught by the Spirit of God. Many and many a time, when things seemed darker than usual, Marjorie would run in to see him, and she always came away feeling brighter and better.
It was on the very day upon which she first made old Enoch's acquaintance that, as she was going back to Colwyn House, she had a great and most unexpected surprise. Coming along the lane to meet her, and picking his way amongst the pools which even the spring sunshine had not dried up, she saw a well-known figure, and her heart danced with joy at the sight, for it seemed to her like a bit of home put down amongst the dreariness of Daisy Bank.