12 
House & Garden 
“One morning, after the war broke out, I’d 
taken some mackerel up to Cap'n Ellis. 
“ ‘Are you quite sure they’re fresh,’ he said, 
the same as he always did, though they were 
always a free gift to him. But he meant no 
offense. 
‘“Fresh as your own lavender,’ I says, and 
then we laughs as usual, and sat down to look 
at the ships, wondering whether they were 
transports, or Red Cross, or men-of-war, as 
they lay along the horizon. Sometimes we’d 
see an air-plane. They used to buzz up and 
down that coast all day; and Cap’n Ellis would 
begin comparing it through his glass with the 
dragon flies that flickered over his gilly-flow- 
ers. There was a southwest wind blowing in 
from the sea over his garden, and it brought 
us big puffs of scent from the flowers. 
“ ‘Hour after hour,’ he says, ‘day after day, 
sometimes for weeks I’ve known the south¬ 
west wind to blow like that. It’s the wind 
that wrecked the Armada,’ he says, ‘and, 
though it comes gently to my garden, you’d 
think it would blow all the scents out of the 
flowers in a few minutes. But it don’t,’ he 
says. ‘The more the wind blows, the more 
sweetness they give out,’ he says. ‘Have you 
ever considered,’ he says, ‘how one little clump 
of wild thyme will go on pouring its heart 
out on the wind? Where does it all come 
from?’ 
“I was always a bit awkward when ques¬ 
tions like that were put to me; so—just to turn 
him off like—I says ‘Consider the lilies of the 
field.’ 
“ ‘Ah,’ he says, turning to me with his eyes 
shining. ‘That’s the way to look at it.’ I 
heard him murmuring another text under his 
breath. ‘Come, thou south, and blow upon 
my garden.’ And he shook hands with me 
when I said good-by, as if I’d shown him my 
feeling, which made me feel I wasn’t treating 
him right, for I’d only said the first thing that 
came into my mind owing to my awkwardness 
at such times. 
“Well, it was always disturbing me to think 
what might happen to Cap’n Ellis, if one day 
he should find his garden slipping away to the 
beach. It overhung quite a little already; and 
there had been one or two big falls of chalk 
a few hundred yards away. Some said that 
the guns at sea were shaking down the loose 
boulders. 
“Of course, he was an old man now, three 
score years and ten, at least; and my own be¬ 
lief was that if his garden went, he would go 
with it. The parish council was very anx¬ 
ious to save a long strip of the cliff adjoining 
his garden, because it was their property; and 
they’d been building a stone wall along the 
beach below to protect it from the high tide. 
But they were going to stop short of Cap’n 
Ellis’s property, because of the expense, and 
he couldn’t afford to do it himself. A few of 
us got together in the Plough and tried to work 
out a plan of carrying on the wall, by mis¬ 
take, about fifteen feet further, which was all 
it needed. We’d got the foreman on our side, 
and it looked as if we should get it done at 
the council’s expense after all, which was 
hardly honest, no doubt, in a manner of 
speaking, though Cap’n Ellis knew nothing 
about it. 
“But the end came in a way that no wall 
could have prevented, though it proved we were 
right about the old man having set his heart 
in that garden. David Copper, the shepherd, 
saw the whole thing. It happened about seven 
o’clock of a fine summer morning, when the 
downs were all laid out in little square patches, 
here a patch of red clover, and there a patch 
of yellow mustard, for all the world like a 
crazy quilt, only made of flowers, and smelling 
like Eden garden itself for the dew upon 
them. 
“It was all still and blue in the sky, and 
the larks going up around the dew-ponds and 
bursting their pretty little hearts for joy that 
they was alive, when, just as if the shadow of 
a hawk had touched them, they all wheeled off 
and dropped silent. 
“Pretty soon, there was a whirring along 
the coast, and one of them air-planes came up, 
shining like silver in the morning sun. Cop¬ 
per didn’t pay much attention to it at first, for 
it looked just as peaceable as any of our own, 
which he thought it was. Then he sees a flash, 
in the middle of Cap’n Ellis’s garden, and the 
overhung piece, where the little clumps of thrift 
were, goes rumbling down to the beach, like 
as if a big bag of flour had been emptied over 
the side. The air-plane circled overhead, and 
Copper thinks it was trying to hit the coast¬ 
guard station, which was only a few score 
yards away, though there was nobody there 
that morning but the coastguard’s wife, and 
the old black figurehead in front of it, and 
there never was any guns there at any time. 
“The next thing Copper saw was Cap’n 
Ellis running out into what was left of his 
garden, with his night-shirt flapping around 
him, for all the world like a little white sea- 
swallow. He runs down with his arms out, as 
if he was trying to catch hold of his garden 
an’ save it. Copper says he never knew 
whether the old man would have gone over the 
edge of the cliff or not. He thinks he would, 
for he was running wildly. But before he 
reached the edge there was another flash, and 
(Continued on page 60) 
