December, 1918 
ll 
“T DON’T know about three acres and a 
JL cow, but every man ought to have his 
garden. That’s the way I look at it,” said the 
old fisherman, picking up another yard of 
brown net that lay across his knees. “There’s 
gardens that you see, and gardens that you 
don’t see. There’s gardens all shut in with 
hedges, prickly hedges that ’ull tear your hand 
if you try' to make a spy-hole in them; and 
some that you wouldn’t know was there at all 
—invisible gardens, like the ones that Cap’n 
Ellis used to talk about. 
“I never followed him rightly; for I sup¬ 
posed he meant the garden of the heart, the 
same as the sentimental song; but he hadn’t 
any use for that song, he told me. My wife 
sent it to him for a Christmas present, think¬ 
ing it would please him; and he used it for 
pipe-lights. The words was very pretty, I 
thought, and very appropriate to his feelings: 
’Ef I should plant a little seed of love, 
In the garden of your heart. 
That’s how it went. But he didn’t like it. 
“Then there’s other gardens that every one 
can see, both market gardens and flower-gar¬ 
dens. Cap’n Ellis told me he knew a man 
once that wore a cauliflower in his buttonhole, 
whenever he went to chapel, and thought it 
was a rose. Leastways, he thought that every 
one else thought it was a rose. Kind of an 
orstrich he must have been. But that wasn’t 
the way with Cap’n Ellis. Every one could 
see his garden, though he had a nice big hedge 
round three sides of it, and it wasn’t more than 
three-quarters of an acre. Right on the edge 
of the white chalk coast it was; and his little 
six-room cottage looked like a piece of the 
white chalk itself. 
“But he was a queer old chap, and he al¬ 
ways would have it 
that nobody could 
really see his gar¬ 
den. I used to take 
him a few mackerel 
occasionally-—h e 
liked ’em for his 
supper — and he’d 
walk in his garden 
with me for half an 
hour at a time. 
Then, just as I’d be 
going he’d give a lit¬ 
tle smile and say, 
‘well, you haven’t seen my garden yet! You 
must come again.’ 
“ ‘Haven’t seen your garden,’ I’d say. ‘I’ve 
been looking at it this half hour an’ more!’ 
“ ‘Once upon a time, there was a man that 
couldn’t see a joke,’ he’d say. Then he’d go 
off chuckling, and swinging his mackerel 
against the hollyhocks. 
“Funny little old chap he was, with a 
pinched white face, and a long nose, and big 
gray eyes, and fluffy white hair for all the 
world like swans’ down. But he’d been a good 
seaman in his day. 
“He’d sit there, in his porch, with his spy¬ 
glass to his eye, looking out over his garden 
at the ships as they went up and down the 
Channel. Then he’d lower his glass a little 
to look at the butterflies, fluttering like little 
white sails over the clumps of thrift at the 
edge of the cliff, and settling on the little pink 
flowers. Very pretty they was too. He planted 
them there at the end of his garden, which ran 
straight down from his cottage to the edge of 
the cliff. He said his wife liked to see them 
nodding their pink heads against the blue sea, 
in the old days, when she was waiting for him 
to come home from one of his voyages. ‘Pink 
and blue,’ he says, ‘is a very pretty combina¬ 
tion.’ They matched her eyes and cheeks, too, 
as I’ve been told. But she’s been dead now 
for twenty-five years or more. 
“He had just one little winding path through 
the garden to the edge of the cliff; an’ all the 
rest, at the right time of the year, was flowers. 
He’d planted a little copse of fir trees to the 
west of it, so as to shelter the flowers; and 
every one laughed at him for doing it. The 
sea encroaches a good many yards along this 
coast every year, and the cliffs were crumbling 
away with every tide. The neighbors told him 
that, if he wanted a flower-garden, he’d better 
move inland. 
“ ‘It was a quarter of a mile inland,’ he 
says, ‘when Polly and me first came to live 
here; and it hasn’t touched my garden yet. It 
never will touch it,’ he says, ‘not while I’m 
alive. There are good break-waters down be¬ 
low, and it will last me my time. Perhaps the 
trees won’t grow to their full height, but I 
shan’t be here to see,’ he says, ‘and it’s not the 
trees I’m thinking about. It’s the garden. 
They don’t have to be very tall to shelter my 
garden. As for the sea,’ he says, ‘it’s my win¬ 
dow, my bay-window, and I hope you see the 
joke. If I was inland, with four hedges 
around my garden, instead of three,’ he says, 
“it would be like living in a house without a 
window. Three hedges and a big blue bay- 
window, that’s the garden for me,’ he says. 
“And so he planted it full of every kind of 
flowers that he could grow. He had sweet 
Williams, and larkspurs, and old man’s beard, 
and lavender, and gilly-flowers, and a lot of 
them old - fashioned sweet - smelling flowers, 
with names that he used to say were like 
church-bells at evening, in the old villages, out 
of reach of the railway lines. 
“And they all had a meaning to him which 
others didn’t know. You might walk with 
him for a whole summer’s afternoon in his 
garden, but it seemed as if his flowers kept the 
sweetest part of their scents for old Cap’n 
Ellis. He’d pick one of them aromatic leaves, 
and roll it in his fingers, and put it to his nose 
and say ‘Ah,’ like as if he was talking to his 
dead sweetheart. 
“ ‘It’s a strange thing,’ he’d say, ‘but when 
she was alive, I was away at sea for fully three 
parts of the year. We always talked of the 
time when I’d retire from the sea. We thought 
we’d settle down together in our garden and 
watch the ships. But, when that time came, 
it was her turn to go away, and it’s my turn 
to wait. But there’s a garden where we meet,’ 
he’d say, ‘and that’s the garden you’ve never 
seen.’ 
“There was one little patch, on the warm¬ 
est and most sheltered side, that he called his 
wife’s garden; and it was this that I thought 
he meant. It was just about as big as her 
grave, and he had little clusters of her favorite 
flowers there—rosemary, and the pansies and 
Canterbury bells, and her name Ruth, done 
very neat and pretty in Sussex violets. It 
came up every year 
in April, like as if 
the garden was re¬ 
membering. 
“Parson consid¬ 
ered that Cap’n El¬ 
lis was a very inter¬ 
esting man. 
“ ‘He’s quite a 
philosopher,’ he said 
to me one day; and I 
suppose that was why 
the old chap talked 
so queer at times. 
