Of course I did not disclose to the Member for Sark, what had taken place in the privity of OLD MORALITY's room. That is not my way. The secret is ever sacred with me, and shall be carried with me to the silent tomb. But I was much impressed with the practical suggestions of my esteemed Leader, and allured by their evident effect upon his appetite.
"Men," continued the Member for Sark, moodily, "do all kinds of things in the Recess to make up for the inroads on the constitution suffered during the Session. They go to La Bourboule like the MARKISS and RAIKES; or they play Golf like Prince ARTHUR; or they pay visits to their Mothers-in-law in the United States, like CHAMBERLAIN and LYON PLAYFAIR; or they go to Switzerland, India, Russia, Australia, and Sierra Leone. Now if we had a garden, which we dug, and weeded, and clipped, and pruned ourselves, never eating a potato the sapling of which we had not planted, watered, and if necessary grafted, with our own hands, we should live happy, healthful lives for at least a month or two, coming back to our work having renewed our youth like the rhinoceros."
"But you don't know anything about gardening, do you?"
"That's just it. Anyone can keep a garden that has been brought up to the business. But look what chances there are before two statesmen of, I trust I may say without egotism, average intelligence, who take to gardening without, as you may say, knowing anything about it. Think of the charm of being able to call a spade a Hoe! without your companion, however contentious, capping the exclamation. Then think of the long vista of possible surprises. You dig a trench, and I gently sprinkle seed in it—"
"Excuse me," I said, "but supposing I sprinkle the seed, and you dig the trench?"
"—The seed is carrot, let us suppose," the Member for Sark continued, disregarding my interruption, his fine face aglow with honest enthusiasm. "I, not being an adept, feeling my way, as it were, towards the perfection of knowledge, put in the seed the wrong end up, and, instead of the carrots presenting themselves to the earnest inquirer in what is, I believe, the ordinary fashion, with the green tops showing above the generous earth, and the spiral, rosy-tinted, cylindrical form hidden in the soil, the limb were to grow out of the ground, its head downward; would that be nothing, do you think? I mention that only as a possibility that flashed across my mind. There are an illimitable series of possibilities that might grow out of Our Garden. Of course we don't mean to make money out of it. It's only fair to you, TOBY, that I should, at the outset, beg you to hustle out of your mind any sordid ideas of that kind. What we seek is, health and honest occupation, and here they lie open to our hand."
This conversation, as I mentioned, took place a little more than a year ago. I was carried away, as the House of Commons never is, by my Hon. friend's eloquence. We got the garden. We have it now; but I do not trust myself on this page to dwell on the subject.
FEMININE AND A N-UTAH GENDER.—Plurality of wives is abolished in Utah. The husbands seem to have made no difficulty about it, but what have the wives said?