’nec fertilis illa juvencis,
      Nec Cereri opportuna seges, nec commoda Baccho.’

To attend to it my father employed, on Wednesdays and Saturdays, an old fellow over whose head some sixty-five summers had passed without imparting to it a single secret.  In short, he was the very worst gardener in West Bromicheham, and so obstinately, so insufferably, opinionated withal that one day, in a fit of irritation, my father slew him with his own spade.

“This done, he had at once to consider how to dispose of the body.  Our garden, as I have said, was confined within brick walls, two long and one short; and this last my father had screened with a rustic shed and a couple of laurel-bushes; that from his back-parlour window, where he sat and smoked his pipe on a Sunday afternoon, he might watch the path ‘wandering,’ as he put it, ‘into the shrubbery,’ and feast his eyes on a domain which extended not only further than the arm could stretch, but even a little further than the eye could reach.

“In the space, then, intervening between the laurels and the terminal wall my father dug a grave two spits deep and interred the corpse, covering it with a light compost of loam and leaf-mould.  This was on a Wednesday—­the second Wednesday in July, as he was always particular to mention. (And I have heard him tell the story a score of times.)

“On the Sunday week, at half-past three in the afternoon, my father had finished his pipe and was laying it down, before covering his head (as his custom was) with a silk handkerchief to protect his slumber from the flies, when, happening to glance towards the shrubbery, he espied a remarkably fine crimson hollyhock overtopping the laurels.  He rubbed his eyes.  He had invested in past years many a shilling in hollyhock seed, but never till now had a plant bloomed in his garden.

“He rubbed his eyes, I say.  But there stood the hollyhock.  He rushed from the room, through the back-doorway and down the garden.  My excellent mother, aroused from her siesta by the slamming of the door, dropped the Family Bible from her lap, and tottered in pursuit.  She found my father at the angle of the shrubbery, at a standstill before a tangled mass of vegetation.  Hollyhocks, sunflowers, larkspurs, lilies, carnations, stocks—­every bulb, every seed which the dead man had failed to cultivate—­were ramping now and climbing from his grave high into the light.  My father tore his way through the thicket to the tool-shed, dragged forth a hook and positively hacked a path back to my mother, barely in time to release her from the coils of a major convolvulus (ipomoea purpurea) which had her fast by the ankles.

“Now, this story, which my father used to tell modestly enough, to account for his success at our local flower-shows, seems to me to hold a deeper significance, and a moral which I will not insult your intelligence by extracting for you . . .  The actions of the just?  Foh!” continued Mr. Fett, and filled his mouth with melon.  “What about their passions? Why, sir, yet another story occurs to me, which might pass for an express epologue upon your father’s career.  Did you never hear tell of the Grand Duchess Sophia of Carinthia and her Three Wooers?”