the only one at home," he remarked, for there had
been no answer to his raps; "and you are too busy getting a bead on
Goliath to answer the immaterial questions of a wayfarer."

Accepting the freedom of the Little Rivers custom on such occasions, he
followed the path to the rear. His head knocked off the dead petals of a
rambler rose blossom, scattering them at his feet. Rounding the corner of
the house, he saw the arbor where he had dined the night of his arrival,
and beyond this an old-fashioned flower garden separated by a path from
a garden of roses. There was a sound of activity from the kitchen behind
a trellis screen, but he did not call out for guidance. He would trust to
finding his own way.

When he came to the broad path, its stretch lay under a crochet-work of
shadows from the ragged leaves of two rows of palms which ran to the edge
of an orange grove, and the centre of this path was in a straight line
with the bottom of the V of Galeria.

Jasper Ewold had laid out his little domain according to a set plan
before the water was first let go in laughing triumph over the parched
earth, and this plan, as one might see on every hand, was expressive of
the training of older civilizations in landscape gardening, which ages of
men striving for harmonious forms of beauty in green and growing things
had tested, and which the Doge, in all his unconventionalism of
personality, was as little inclined to amend as he was to amend the
classic authors. An avenue of palms is the epic of the desert; a
bougainvillea vine its sonnet.

Between the palms to the right and left Jack had glimpses of a vegetable
garden; of rows of berry bushes; of a grove of young fig-trees; of rows
of the sword-bundles of pineapple tops. Everything except the
old-fashioned flower-bed, with its border of mignonette, and the generous
beds of roses and other flowers of the bountiful sisterhood of petals of
artificial cultivation, spoke of utility which must make the ground pay
as well as please.

Jack took each step as if he were apprehensive of disturbing the quiet
Midway of the avenue of palms ran a cross avenue, and at the
meeting-point was a circle, which evidently waited till the oranges and
the olives should pay for a statue and surrounding benches. Over the
breadth of the cross avenue lay the glossy canopy of the outstretched
branches of umbrella-trees. A table of roughly planed boards painted
green and green rattan chairs were in keeping wi