oast. For,
having a glorious circulation, he insisted on as many outdoor meals as
possible, though spring had barely touched the woods and warmed the
seas round that southern extremity of England. His daughter Barbara, a
good-looking girl with heavy red hair and a face as grave as one of the
garden statues, still sat almost motionless as a statue when her father
rose. A fine tall figure in light clothes, with his white hair
and mustache flying backwards rather fiercely from a face that was
good-humored enough, for he carried his very wide Panama hat in his
hand, he strode across the terraced garden, down some stone steps
flanked with old ornamental urns to a more woodland path fringed with
little trees, and so down a zigzag road which descended the craggy Cliff
to the shore, where he was to meet a guest arriving by boat. A yacht
was already in the blue bay, and he could see a boat pulling toward the
little paved pier.

And yet in that short walk between the green turf and the yellow
sands he was destined to find, his hard-headedness provoked into a not
unfamiliar phase which the world was inclined to call hot-headedness.
The fact was that the Cornish peasantry, who composed his tenantry and
domestic establishment, were far from being people with no nonsense
about them. There was, alas! a great deal of nonsense about them;
with ghosts, witches, and traditions as old as Merlin, they seemed to
surround him with a fairy ring of nonsense. But the magic circle had
one center: there was one point in which the curving conversation of the
rustics always returned. It was a point that always pricked the Squire
to exasperation, and even in this short walk he seemed to strike it
everywhere. He paused before descending the steps from the lawn to speak
to the gardener about potting some foreign shrubs, and the gardener
seemed to be gloomily gratified, in every line of his leathery brown
visage, at the chance of indicating that he had formed a low opinion of
foreign shrubs.

"We wish you'd get rid of what you've got here, sir," he observed,
digging doggedly. "Nothing'll grow right with them here."

"Shrubs!" said the Squire, laughing. "You don't call the peacock trees
shrubs, do you? Fine tall trees--you ought to be proud of them."

"Ill weeds grow apace," observed the gardener. "Weeds can grow as houses
when somebody plants them." Then he added: "Him that sowed tares in the
Bible, Squire."

"Oh, blast your--" began the Squire, a