and another put an end to them. And you may see rows and rows of pots, wherein nothing grows nor ever will grow, and wherein the very earth that fills them is of a consistency known nowhere else. Here and there, too, a bit of trellis-work had been put up and painted; in Arcadia gardens it is generally found to be an easy hanging place for cloths and doubtful-looking garments.

[18]

In the gardens of Arcadia Street was one exception. That exception was the house, behind the front window of which, the wistful face of a girl had looked out at Mr. Jordan Tant—that girl about whom he had heard so much from his friend Gilbert Byfield. The house itself, poor and shabby though it was, was neat and scrupulously clean; but the real triumph of it lay in the garden. Not, perhaps, in the artistic sense, but rather that it was a garden of surprises—a place where it was impossible to say what you might meet next, if you wandered carefully through its circumscribed length, and took it seriously.

Yet to anyone to whom the mere name of garden means so much, what a pitiful place! For there was nothing really garden-like about it; it was a place of rags and patches and pretences. The few pitiful plants that struggled out of the black-looking earth[19] here and there seemed to do so not because they liked it, but because they had a desperate desire to show what they could do, even against adverse fate, when they were put to it. Half a dozen things that could not have been named even by the most careful student in botany stood in pots under the kitchen window; and in front of these, spread out on the earth itself, was an old and very ragged carpet—a trap to the unwary, because of the many holes it contained and the uneven surface it presented on the uneven ground.

[19]

With the idea of hiding the carpet as much as possible, and at the same time of giving an air of luxury to the place, an ancient staggering table on three legs had been placed in the centre of it; and on either side of this table a chair, long since set aside as being too deplorable even for use in that house. It was a very mockery of a table, and the chairs were in a dreadful conspiracy with it to let down any unwary mortal who should attempt to sit upon them in their old age, unless he treated them with due caution and respect.

Nor was this all; the garden held other treasures. Another ancient strip of carpet, as ragged as its fellow, had been hung against a wall to form a species of background to a crazy box that stood 

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