he Man's_ sudden return to Opal Farm and
if it will interfere with Maria Maxwell's daily care of Amos Opie; for,
as it turns out, he is really ill, the chill resulting from Larry's
prank having been the final straw, and no suitable woman having been
found, who has volunteered to tend the old man in the emergency, but
Maria! That is, to the extent of taking him food and giving him
medicines, for though in pain he is able to sit in an easy-chair. Maria
certainly is capable, but so stupid about _The Man_. However, as the
farm-house is now arranged as two dwellings, with the connecting door
opening in the back hall and usually kept locked on Amos's side, she
cannot possibly feel that she is putting herself in _The Man's_ way!

XIII

LILIES AND THEIR WHIMS

(Barbara Campbell to Mary Penrose)

_Oaklands, August 18._ As a suitable text for this chronicle, as well as
an unanswerable argument for its carrying out, combined with a sort of
premium, I'm sending you to-day, freight paid, a barrel of
lily-of-the-valley roots, all vigorous and with many next year's
flowering pips attached.

No,--I hear your decorous protest,--I have not robbed myself, neither am
I giving up the growing of this most exquisite of spring flowers, whose
fragrance penetrates the innermost fastnesses of the memory, yet is
never obtrusive. Simply my long border was full to overflowing and last
season some of the lily bells were growing smaller. When this happens,
as it does every half a dozen years, I dig two eight-inch trenches down
the bed's entire length, and taking out the matted roots, fill the gap
with rich soil, adding the plants thus dispossessed to my purse of
garden wampum, which this time falls into your lap entire. Of the
treatment of the little flower, that is erroneously supposed to feast
only upon leaf-mould in the deep shade, you shall hear later.

By all means begin your lily bed now, for the one season at which the
Madonna lily resents removal the least is during the August resting
time. Then, if you lift her gently while she sleeps, do not let the cool
earth breath that surrounds her dry away, and bed her suitably, she will
awaken and in a month put forth a leafy crown of promise to be fulfilled
next June. Madonna does not like the shifting and lifting that falls to
the lot of so many garden bulbs owing to the modern requirements that
make a single flower bed often a thing of three seasonal changes. Many
bulbs, many moods an