The Project Gutenberg eBook of Merry-Garden and Other Stories, by Sir
Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

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Title: Merry-Garden and Other Stories

Author: Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

Release Date: January 15, 2009 [eBook #27813]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MERRY-GARDEN AND OTHER STORIES***

E-text prepared by Lionel Sear

MERRY-GARDEN AND OTHER STORIES.

by

ARTHUR THOMAS QUILLER-COUCH.

1907

This e-text was prepared from a version published in 1907.

CONTENTS.

MERRY-GARDEN.

THE BEND OF THE ROAD.

HI-SPY-HI.

HIS EXCELLENCY'S PRIZE-FIGHT.

THE _BLACK JOKE_.

WHERE THE TREASURE IS.

A JEST OF AMBIALET.

MERRY GARDEN.

I.

PROLOGUE.

Beside a winding creek of the Lynher River, and not far from the Cornish
borough of Saltash, you may find a roofless building so closely backed
with cherry-orchards that the trees seem by their slow pressure to be
thrusting the mud-walls down to the river's brink, there to topple and
fall into the tide. The old trees, though sheeted with white blossom in
the spring, bear little fruit, and that of so poor a flavour as to be
scarcely worth picking. They have, in fact, almost reverted to savagery,
even as the cottage itself is crumbling back to the earth out of which it
was built. On the slope above the cherry-orchards, if you moor your boat
at the tumble-down quay and climb by half-obliterated pathways, you will
come to a hedge of brambles, and to a broken gate with a well beside it;
and beyond the gate to an orchard of apple-trees, planted in times when,
regularly as Christmas Eve came round, Aunt Barbree Furnace, her maid
Susannah, and the boy Nandy, would mount by this same path with a bowl of
cider, and anoint the stems one by one, reciting--

_Here's to thee, good apple-tree--
Pockets full, hats full, great bushel-bags full!
Amen, an' vire off the gun!_

--Whereupon Nandy, always after a caution to be extry-careful, would shut
his eyes, pull the trigger of his blunderbuss, and wake all the echoes of
the creek in an uproar which, as Susannah ne