nd come to terms. At
last the matter was settled. I abandoned my last five-dollar ditch,
thinking that the relief of seeing the last of Poppy would be cheap at
the price. There were four of us, and we would not hesitate to pay two
dollars each for theatre tickets, which would be eight dollars, so
really I was saving money.

A nice little girl with flaxen pigtails brought her father's check. She
and her brother tied Poppy behind their buggy and slowly disappeared
down the hill. There was the flutter of a handkerchief from the other
side of the canyon, and that was all.

In the words of that disturbing telegram:

"Salve atque vale."

[Illustration]

GARDENERS

"Venite agile, barchetta mia
Santa Lucia, Santa Lucia!"

accompanied by the enchanting fragrance of burning sage-brush, is wafted
up to my sleeping-porch, and I know that Signor Constantino Garibaldi is
early at work clearing the canyon side so that our Matilija poppies
shall not be crowded out by the wild. It is a pleasant awakening to a
pleasant world as the light morning mist melts away from a bay as
"bright and soft and bloomin' blue" as any Kipling ever saw. It seems
almost too good to be true, that in a perfect Italian setting we should
have stumbled on an Italian gardener, who whistles Verdi as he works.
True, he doesn't know the flowers by name, and in his hands a pair of
clippers are as fatal as the shears in the hands of Atropos, but he is
in the picture. When I see gardeners pruning I realize that that lady of
destiny shows wonderful restraint about our threads of fate--the
temptation to snip seems so irresistible.

Signor Garibaldi is a retired wine merchant driven out-of-doors by
illness, a most courteous and sensitive soul, with a talent for
letter-writing that is alone worth all the plumbago blossoms that he cut
away last year. The following letter was written to J---- while
Garibaldi was in charge of our hill-top, the bareness of which we strove
to cover with wild flowers until we could make just the kind of garden
we wanted:

March 15.

DEAR SIR:

The last time I had the pleasure of see you in your place, Villa
Collina Ridente, you exclaimed with a melancholic voice, "Only
poppies and mignonette came out of the wild flower seeds." "So it
is," said I in the same tune of voice. Time proved we was both
wrong; many other flowers made their retarded appearance, so
deserving the name of wil