48 HOME AND GARDEN 



cage, a favourite cottage plant, grows thrivingly in the 

 already crowded border, barely a foot wide, between 

 the building and the pavement. 



It is in the old cottages that we find the true 

 old country people, some of whose womenkind have 

 hardly ever been more than ten miles from home ; 

 people who still retain the speech and ways of thought 

 and plain simple dress of the early part of the century. 

 All my life I can remember my old friend with the 

 donkey-cart, in intimate association with the lanes 

 near my home. He worked under the road-surveyor, 

 trimming overgrowing hedges and road edges, and. re- 

 moving incidental obstructions, as of the many Hazels 

 pulled down and left hanging into the road by nut- 

 hunting boys in September, and boughs blown down by 

 winter storms, and drifts of dead leaves in November. 

 The white donkey, who carried tools and worker, 

 waited all day on some handy wayside patch of -grass 

 where he found food and rest. Man and beast grew 

 old together in many a long year's companionship of 

 toil, until at length neither could work any longer. A 

 farmer who was a kind neighbour to the old man told 

 me a pathetic story of how he had come to ask him 

 to shoot the old donkey, who could no longer feed 

 and was evidently very near his end. " The old man 

 he sobbed and cried something turrible," said my 

 friend the farmer. Afterwards, when I asked how old 

 the donkey was, and how long the two had worked 

 together, the old road-man said : "I know his age 



