, and white."

"What are hepaticas like?" I asked.

"Let me show you," said Mr. Andrewes, crossing the garden. "Look here!
there are the pretty little things. I have seen them growing wild in
Canada--single ones, that is. The leaves are of a dull green, and when
they fade, the whole plant is hardly to be distinguished from Mother
Earth--at least, not by a gardener's eye. If you will promise me not
to let the gardener meddle with them, unless you are there to look
after him, I will give you plants for your beds and borders, my boy."

"Oh, thank you," I said; "I like gardening very much. I should like to
garden like you. I've got a spade, and a hoe, and a fork, and I had a
rake, but it's lost. But I know papa will give me another; and I can
tidy my own beds, so the gardener need not touch them; and if there
was a wheelbarrow small enough for me to wheel, I could take my weeds
away myself, you know."

And I chattered on about my garden, for, like other children, I was
apt to "take up" things very warmly, in imitation of other people; and
Mr. Andrewes had already fired my imagination with dreams of a little
garden in perfect order and beauty, and tended by my own hands alone;
and as I talked of my garden, the parson talked of his, and so we
wandered from border to border, finding each other very good company,
Rubens walking demurely at our heels. A great many of Mr. Andrewes'
remarks, though I am sure they were very instructive, were beyond my
power of understanding; but as he closed each lecture on the various
flowers by a promise of a root, a cutting, a sucker, a seedling, or a
bulb, as the case might be, I was an attentive and well-satisfied
listener. I much admired some daffodils, and Mr. Andrewes at once
began to pick a bunch of them for me.

"Isn't it a pity to pick them?" I said, politely.

"My dear Regie," said Mr. Andrewes, "if ever you see anybody with a
good garden of flowers who grudges picking them for his friends, you
may be quite sure he has not learnt half of what his flowers can teach
him. Flowers are generous enough. The more you take from them the more
they give. And yet I have seen people with beds glowing with
geraniums, and trees laden with roses, who grudged to pluck them, not
knowing that they would bloom all the better and more luxuriantly for
being culled."

"Do daffodils flower better when the flowers are picked off?" I asked,
having my full share of the childish propensity for asking awkw