you know it's really awful.
I'm so cut up about it I don't know what to do. I wish you'd let me help
you out of this hole till you're on your feet. I've got nobody on me,
you see, and I can't spend half of my income."

For the first time in our long acquaintance the tables were turned; it
was George who was awkward now, and I who was perfectly at my ease.

"I can't do that, George," I said quietly, "but I'm grateful to you all
the same. You're a first-rate chap."

We shook hands with a grip, and while he still lingered to strike a
match and light the fresh cigar he had taken from his case, the little
yellow flame followed, like an illuminated pointer, the expression of
suffering violence which showed so strangely upon his face. Then,
tossing the match into the gutter, he went on his way, while I passed
the great scarred body of the sycamore and hurried down the long hill,
which I never descended without recalling, as the General had said, that
I had once "toted potatoes for John Chitling."

At the beginning of the next block, I saw the miniature box hedge and
the clipped yew in the little garden of Dr. Theophilus, and as I turned
down the side street, the face of the old man looked at me from the
midst of some leafless red currant bushes that grew in clumps at the end
of the walk.

"Come in, Ben, come in a minute," he called, beaming at me over his
lowered spectacles, "there's a thing or two I should like to say."

As I entered the garden and walked along the tiny path, bordered by
oyster shells, to the red currant bushes beyond, he laid his
pruning-knife on the ground, and sat down on an old bench beside a
little green table, on which a sparrow was hopping about. On his
seventy-fifth birthday he had resigned his profession to take to
gardening, and I had heard from no less an authority than the General
that "that old fool Theophilus was spending more money in roses than
Mrs. Clay was making out of pickles."

"What is it, doctor?" I asked, for, oppressed by my own burdens, I
waited a little impatiently to hear "the thing or two" he wanted to say.

"You see I've given up people, Ben, and taken to roses," he began, while
I stood grinding my heel into the gravelled walk; "and it's a good
change, too, when you come to my years, there's no doubt of that. If you
weed and water them and plant an occasional onion about their roots you
can make roses what you want--but you can't people--no, not even when
you've helped t