and I did not work long. I was almost in despair about the garden. Fully half had not been touched, and what I had already done looked ragged and as if it needed doing over again. The more I dug, the more great chunks of sod I found buried in it, and it seemed as if my garden, when I had dug out all the chunks of sod, would be a pit instead of a level. It threatened to be a sunken garden. 

I

 “Isobel,” I said angrily, when the sun had set and I was once more sitting in the chair on my veranda, with my hands wrapped in wet handkerchiefs, “you know how passionately fond of gardening I am, and how I longed and pined for a garden for two full years, and you know, therefore, that it takes a great deal of gardening to satisfy me; but I must say that the man who laid out that garden must have been a man of shameful leisure. He laid out a garden twice as large as any garden should be.”  

 “Then why do you try to work it all?” she asked. 

 “Oh, work it!” I exclaimed with some irritation. “I can't let half a garden go to weeds! That would look nice, wouldn't it! I'll work it all right! You don't care how I suffer and struggle. You sit here—”  

 The next evening when I reached home 

 I did not feel particularly happy. My hands were quite raw, and my back had sharp pains and was stiff, and I spoke gruffly to Millington when he suggested an automobile ride to Port Lafayette for that evening. 

 “No!” I said shortly. “You ought to know I can't go. I've got to kill myself in that garden!”  

 But I was resolved Isobel should never see me conquered by a patch of ground, and after dinner I went out with my spade and hoe. When my glance fell on the garden I stopped short. I was very angry. 

 “Isobel?” I called sharply. 

 She came tripping around the house and to my side. 

 “Who did that?” I asked severely. I was in no mood for nonsense. 

 She looked at the garden. One half of it—not the half I had struggled with, but the other 'half—had been spaded, crushed, ridged, planted, and left in perfect condition. The small cabbage plants had been carefully watered. Not a grain of earth was larger than a pin head. Not a blade of grass stuck up anywhere. Isobel looked at the garden, and then at me. 

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