rs. A man does
not plant a tree for himself, he plants it for posterity. And, sitting
idly in the sunshine, I think at times of the unborn people who will,
to some small extent, be indebted to me. Remember me kindly, ye future
men and women! When I am dead, the juice of my apples will foam and
spurt in your cider-presses, my plums will gather for you their misty
bloom; and that any of your youngsters should be choked by one of my
cherry-stones, merciful Heaven forfend!

In this pleasant summer weather I hold my audience in my garden rather
than in my house. In all my interviews the sun is a third party.
Every village has its Fool, and, of course, Dreamthorp is not without
one. Him I get to run my messages for me, and he occasionally turns my
garden borders with a neat hand enough. He and I hold frequent
converse, and people here, I have been told, think we have certain
points of sympathy. Although this is not meant for a compliment, I
take it for one. The poor faithful creature's brain has strange
visitors; now 't is fun, now wisdom, and now something which seems in
the queerest way a compound of both. He lives in a kind of twilight
which obscures objects, and his remarks seem to come from another world
than that in which ordinary people live. He is the only original
person of my acquaintance; his views of life are his own, and form a
singular commentary on those generally accepted. He is dull enough at
times, poor fellow; but anon he startles you with something, and you
think he must have wandered out of Shakspeare's plays into this
out-of-the-way place. Up from the village now and then comes to visit
me the tall, gaunt, atrabilious confectioner, who has a hankering after
Red-republicanism, and the destruction of Queen, Lords, and Commons.
Guy Fawkes is, I believe, the only martyr in his calendar. The
sourest-tempered man, I think, that ever engaged in the manufacture of
sweetmeats. I wonder that the oddity of the thing never strikes
himself. To be at all consistent, he should put poison in his
lozenges, and become the Herod of the village innocents. One of his
many eccentricities is a love for flowers, and he visits me often to
have a look at my greenhouse and my borders. I listen to his truculent
and revolutionary speeches, and take my revenge by sending the gloomy
egotist away with a nosegay in his hand, and a gay-coloured flower
stuck in a button-hole. He goes quite unconscious of my floral satir