re dozens of trees of peaches, nectarines, and downy
golden apricots.

As to the apples, they grew by the bushel, almost by the ton; and for
strawberries and the other lower fruits there was no such garden near.

Then there was Helen's conservatory, always full of sweet-scented
flowers, and the vinery and pits, where the great purple and amber
bunches hung and ripened, and the long green cucumber and melon came in
their good time.

But Dan'l grumbled, as gardeners will.

"Blights is offle," he said. "It's the blightiest garden I ever see,
and a man might spend all his life keeping the birds down with a gun."

But Dan'l did not spend any part of his life, let alone all, keeping the
birds down with a gun. The doctor caught him shooting one day, and
nearly shot him out of the place.

"How dare you, sir?" he cried. "I will not have a single bird
destroyed."

"Then you won't get no peace, sir, nor not a bit of fruit."

"I shall have the place overrun with slugs and snails, and all kinds of
injurious blight, sir, if you use that gun. No, sir, you'll put nets
over the fruit when it's beginning to ripen. That will do."

The doctor walked away with Helen, and as soon as they were out of
sight, behind the great laurustinus clump, Helen threw her arms about
his neck, and kissed him for saving her pet birds.

Consequently, in addition to abundance of fruit, and although it was so
close in the town, there was always a chorus of song in the season; and
even the nightingale came from the woodlands across the river and sang
within the orchard, through which the river ran.

That river alone half made the place, for it was one of those useless
rivers, so commercial men called it, where the most you could do was
pleasure-boating; barges only being able to ascend to Coleby Bridge, a
sort of busy colony from the town, two miles nearer the sea.

"Yes, sir," Sir James Danby had been known to say, "if the river could
be deepened right through the town it would be the making of the place."

"And the spoiling of my grounds," said the doctor, "so I'm glad it runs
over the solid rock."

This paradise of a garden was the one into which Dexter darted, and in
which Dan'l Copestake was grumbling that morning--

"Like a bear with a sore head, that's what I say," said Peter Cribb to
the under-gardener. "Nothing never suits him."

"Yes, it do," said Dan'l, showing a very red face over a clump of
rhododendron. "Master said you wa