why you're lookin' at me that way," said I.

"And why?" said she.

"'Tis for sheer love o' me!"

She was strangely moved by this. Her hands, passionately clasped of a
sudden, she laid upon her heart; and she drew a sharp, quivering
breath.

"You're getting so--so--strong and--and--so _big_!" she cried.

"Hut!" said I. "'Tis nothin' t' cry about!"

"Oh," she sobbed, "I'm _proud_ t' be the mother of a son!"

I started up.

"I'm that proud," she went on, hovering now between great joy and pain,
"that it--it--fair _hurts_ me!"

"I'll not have you cry!" I protested.

She caught me in her arms and we broke into merry laughter. Then to
please her I said that I would gather flowers for her hair--and she
would be the stranded mermaid and I the fisherman whom she besought to
put her back in the sea and rewarded with three wishes--and I sought
flowers everywhere in the hollows and crevices of the bald old Watchman,
where, through years, some soil had gathered, but found only whisps of
wiry grass and one wretched blossom; whereupon I returned to her very
wroth.

"God made a botch o' the world!" I declared.

She looked up in dismay.

"Ay," I repeated, with a stamp of the foot, "a wonderful botch o' the
world He's gone an' made. Why, they's but one flower on the Watchman!"

She looked over the barren land--the great gray waste of naked rock--and
sighed.

"But one?" she asked, softly.

"An I was God," I said, indignantly, "I'd have made _more_ flowers an'
made un _bigger_."

She smiled in the way of one dreaming.

"Hut!" I went on, giving daring wing to my imagination. "I'd have made a
hundred kinds an' soil enough t' grow un all--_every one o' the whole
hundred!_ I'd have----"

She laid a soft hand on my lips. "'Tis a land," she whispered, with
shining eyes, "that grows rosy lads, and I'm well content!"

"'Tis a poor way," I continued, disregarding her caress, "t' gather soil
in buckets. _I'd_ have made enough t' gather it in _barrows_! I'd have
made lots of it--heaps of it. Why," I boasted, growing yet more
recklessly prodigal, "I'd have made a _hill_ of it somewheres handy t'
every harbour in the world--as big as the Watchman--ay, an' handy t' the
harbours, so the folk could take so much as they wanted--t' make
potato-gardens--an'--an' t' make the grave-yards deep enough. 'Tis a
wonderful poor way," I concluded with contempt, "t' have t' gather it in
buckets from the rocks!"

My mother was laughing hea