the massive posts in
those fifteen years, and some even lay in great masses on the verandah
roof; tecoma, pink and salmon-coloured; purple bougainvillea, and the
snowy mandevillea clusters. Hard-headed people said this was not good
for the building--but Norah's mother had planted them, and because she
had loved them they were never touched.

There was a huge front garden, not at all a proper kind of garden, but a
great stretch of smooth buffalo grass, dotted with all kinds of trees,
amongst which flower beds cropped up in most unexpected and unlikely
places, just as if some giant had flung them out on the grass like a
handful of pebbles that scattered as they flew. They were always trim
and tidy, and the gardener, Hogg, was terribly strict, and woe betide
the author of any small footmarks that he found on one of the freshly
raked surfaces. Nothing annoyed him more than the odd bulbs that used to
come up in the midst of his precious buffalo grass; impertinent crocuses
and daffodils and hyacinths, that certainly had no right there. "Blest
if I know how they ever gets there!" Hogg would say, scratching his
head. Whereat Norah was wont to retire behind a pyramid tree for
purposes of mirth.

Hogg's sworn foe was Lee Wing, the Chinese gardener, who reigned supreme
in the orchard and the kingdom of vegetables--not quite the same thing
as the vegetable kingdom, by the way! Lee Wing was very fat, his broad,
yellow face generally wearing a cheerful grin--unless he happened to
catch sight of Hogg. His long pigtail was always concealed under his
flapping straw hat. Once Jim, who was Norah's big brother, had found him
asleep in his hut with the pigtail drooping over the edge of the bunk.
Jim thought the opportunity too good to lose and, with such deftness
that the Celestial never stirred, he tied the end of the pigtail to the
back of a chair--with rather startling results when Lee Wing awoke with
a sudden sense of being late, and made a spring from the bunk. The chair
of course followed him, and the loud yell of fear and pain raised by the
victim brought half the homestead to the scene of the catastrophe. Jim
was the only one who did not wait for developments. He found business at
the lagoon.

The queerest part of it was that Lee Wing firmly believed Hogg to be the
author of his woe. Nothing moved him from this view, not even when Jim,
finding how matters stood, owned up like a man. "You allee same goo'
boy," said the pigtailed