harm. She trampled nothing. She lifted no
leaf to harm it. When she stopped to speak with him her talk was
"just nonsense, you know." Unconsciously, by the end of the third
day he had looked up twice or thrice from his delving, asking himself
why she was late.

And what (do you suppose) did Corona seek in the kitchen garden?
She too, unknowing, was lonely. Unknowing, this child felt a need
for children, companions. Uncle Copas's doll--well meant and priced
at 1s. 3d.--had somehow missed to engage her affections. She could
not tell him so, but she hated it.

Like every woman-child of her age she was curious about babies.
She had heard, over in America, that babies came either at early
morning or at shut of eve, and were to be found in parsley
beds. Now old Mr. Battershall grew parsley to make you proud.
At the Merchester Rural Gardening Show he regularly took first prize;
his potting-shed, in the north-east angle of the wall, was papered
with winning tickets from bench to roof. At first when he saw Corona
moving about the bed, lifting the parsley leaves, he had a mind to
chide her away; for, as he put it, "Children and chicken be always
a-pickin'--the mischief's in their natur'." Finding, however, that
she did no damage, yet harked back to the parsley again and again, he
set her down for an unusually intelligent child, who somehow knew
good gardening when she saw it.

"Glad to see you admirin' it, missie," he said one morning, coming up
behind her unperceived.

Corona, in the act of upturning a leaf, started and drew back her
hand. Babies--she could not tell why--made their appearance in this
world by stealth, and must be searched for furtively.

"A mort o' prizes I've took with that there parsley one time and
another," pursued Mr. Battershall, not perceiving the flush of guilt
on her face (for his eyesight was, in his own words, not so young as
it used to be). "Goodbody's Curly Mammoth is the strain, and I don't
care who knows it, for the secret's not in the strain, but in the way
o' raisin' it. I grows for a succession, too. Summer or winter
these six-an'-twenty years St. Hospital's ne'er been without a fine
bed o' parsley, I thank the Lord!"

Six-and-twenty years. . . . It was comforting in a way to know that
parsley grew here all the seasons round. But--six-and-twenty years,
and not one child in the place save herself, who had come over from
America! Yet Mr. Battershall was right; it _seemed_