“I’m that proud,” she went on, hovering now between great joy and pain, “that it—it—fair hurts me!”
“I’ll not have you cry!” I protested.
She caught me in her arms and we broke into merry laughter. Then to please her I said that I would gather flowers for her hair—and she would be the stranded mermaid and I the fisherman whom she besought to put her back in the sea and rewarded with three wishes—and I sought flowers everywhere in the hollows and crevices of the bald old Watchman, where, through years, some soil had gathered, but found only whisps of wiry grass and one wretched blossom; whereupon I returned to her very wroth.
“God made a botch o’ the world!” I declared.
She looked up in dismay.
“Ay,” I repeated, with a stamp of the foot, “a wonderful botch o’ the world He’s gone an’ made. Why, they’s but one flower on the Watchman!”
She looked over the barren land—the great gray waste of naked rock—and sighed.
“But one?” she asked, softly.
“An I was God,” I said, indignantly, “I’d have made more flowers an’ made un bigger.”
She smiled in the way of one dreaming.