d," he said, deprecatingly, to Birdwood,
as they stood in colloquy outside. The gardener shook his head.

"It wouldn't do for the Rector to see them cabbages and winter greens.
'I won't have the nasty things in my garden,' he says to me, and he'll
rush at them regular ferocious with a fork. 'I won't have them,' he
says. 'I can't abear the sight of them,' he says. Well, of course I
knows better than go for to contradict him when he gets a downer on any
plant, don't matter whether it's cabbage or calceolaria. But last time,
when he'd done with his massacring of them, I popped round to Mrs. Grey,
and I says, winking at her very hard, but of course not meaning any
disrespectfulness, winking at her very hard, I says, 'Please, mum, I
want one of these new allotments from the glebe.' 'Good Heavings,
Birdwood,' she says, 'whatever on earth can you want with for an
allotment?' With that I winks very hard again and says in a low voice
right into her ear as you might say, 'To keep the wolf from the door,
mum, with a few winter greens.' That's the way we grow our vegetables
for the Rectory, out of an allotment, though we have got five acres of
garden. Now you see what comes of being a connosher. You take my advice,
Mr. Hazlenut, and clear all them cabbages out of sight before the Rector
comes round here again."

"I will certainly," Guy promised. "But you know it's a bit difficult for
me to spend much money on flowers."

"_We_ don't spend money over at the Rectory," said Birdwood, smiling in
a superior way.

"No?"

"_We_ don't spend a penny. _We_ has every mortal plant and seed and
cutting given to us. And not only that, but we gives in our turn. Look
here, Mr. Hazlenut, I'm going to hand you out a bit of advice. The first
time as you go round our garden with the Rector, when you turn into the
second wall-garden, and see a border on your right, you catch hold of
his arm and say, 'Why, good Heavings, if that isn't a new berberis.'"

"Yes, but I don't know what an old berberis looks like," said Guy,
hopelessly, "let alone a new one."

"Never mind what the old ones look like. It's the new I'm telling you
of. Don't you understand that everyone who comes down, from Kew even,
says, 'That's a nice healthy little lot of _Berberis Knightii_ as you've
got a hold of.' 'Ha,' says the Rector. 'I thought as you'd go for to say
that. But it ain't Knightii,' he chuckles, 'and what's more, it ain't
got a name yet, only a number, being a new