at what rate am I overrunning my impulses to ask news from you!
How does your father, sir--that modern Bayard? And Captain Pomery?
And my old friend Billy Priske?"

I told him, briefly as I could, of my father's end. He laid down his
spoon and looked at me for a while across the table with eyes which,
being unused to emotion, betrayed it awkwardly, with a certain shame.

"A great, a lofty gentleman! . . . You'll excuse me, cavalier, but I
am not always nor altogether an ass--and I say to you that half a
dozen such knights would rejuvenate Christendom. As it is, we live
in the last worst ages when the breed can afford but one phoenix at a
time, and he must perforce spend himself on forlorn hopes. Mark you,
I say 'spend,' not 'waste': the seed of such examples cannot be
wasted--"

'Only the actions of the just
Smell sweet and blossom in the dust:'

nay, not their actions only, but their every high thought which
either fate froze or fortune and circumstance choked before it could
put forth flower. Did I ever tell you, Cavalier, the Story of My
Father and the Jobbing Gardener?"

"Not that I remember," said I.

"Yet it is full of instruction as an egg is full of meat. My father,
who (let me remind you) is a wholesale dealer in flash jewellery, had
ever a passion for gardening, albeit that for long he had neither the
time nor the money nor even the space to indulge his hobby.
His garden--a parallelogram of seventy-two feet by twenty-three,
confined by brick walls--lay at the back of our domicile, which
excluded all but the late afternoon sunshine. As the Mantuan would
observe--"

'nec fertilis illa juvencis,
Nec Cereri opportuna seges, nec commoda Baccho.'

To attend to it my father employed, on Wednesdays and Saturdays, an
old fellow over whose head some sixty-five summers had passed without
imparting to it a single secret. In short, he was the very worst
gardener in West Bromicheham, and so obstinately, so insufferably,
opinionated withal that one day, in a fit of irritation, my father
slew him with his own spade.

"This done, he had at once to consider how to dispose of the body.
Our garden, as I have said, was confined within brick walls, two long
and one short; and this last my father had screened with a rustic
shed and a couple of laurel-bushes; that from his back-parlour
window, where he sat and smoked his pipe on a Sunday afternoon, he
might watch the path