and might put out leaves and buds as the weather got warmer. She did
not want it to be a quite dead garden. If it were a quite alive
garden, how wonderful it would be, and what thousands of roses would
grow on every side!

Her skipping-rope had hung over her arm when she came in and after she
had walked about for a while she thought she would skip round the whole
garden, stopping when she wanted to look at things. There seemed to
have been grass paths here and there, and in one or two corners there
were alcoves of evergreen with stone seats or tall moss-covered flower
urns in them.

As she came near the second of these alcoves she stopped skipping.
There had once been a flowerbed in it, and she thought she saw
something sticking out of the black earth--some sharp little pale green
points. She remembered what Ben Weatherstaff had said and she knelt
down to look at them.

"Yes, they are tiny growing things and they might be crocuses or
snowdrops or daffodils," she whispered.

She bent very close to them and sniffed the fresh scent of the damp
earth. She liked it very much.

"Perhaps there are some other ones coming up in other places," she
said. "I will go all over the garden and look."

She did not skip, but walked. She went slowly and kept her eyes on the
ground. She looked in the old border beds and among the grass, and
after she had gone round, trying to miss nothing, she had found ever so
many more sharp, pale green points, and she had become quite excited
again.

"It isn't a quite dead garden," she cried out softly to herself. "Even
if the roses are dead, there are other things alive."

She did not know anything about gardening, but the grass seemed so
thick in some of the places where the green points were pushing their
way through that she thought they did not seem to have room enough to
grow. She searched about until she found a rather sharp piece of wood
and knelt down and dug and weeded out the weeds and grass until she
made nice little clear places around them.

"Now they look as if they could breathe," she said, after she had
finished with the first ones. "I am going to do ever so many more.
I'll do all I can see. If I haven't time today I can come tomorrow."

She went from place to place, and dug and weeded, and enjoyed herself
so immensely that she was led on from bed to bed and into the grass
under the trees. The exercise made her so warm that she first threw
her coat off, and t