“Stolen it off a tree!” scoffed the man; “and why should she bother to creek her neck up’ards when they was lying by the thousand as thick on the ground in that thur orchard as—as—well, as apples!” Eileen looked incredulous. “Yes, by the thousand they was, and not wuth picking up, no one wanted ’em; no men to make cider; no sugar to jam ’em; child’un all got colic a’ready as bad as bad could be, couldn’t swaller no more; too damp to keep. Ay, and we that short o’ cider as we be!” And the aged one—who had been coining money hand over fist, with letter carrying, and the sale of eggs and poultry, and a couple of pigs, and the hay in his paddock, to say nothing of gilt-edged easy little jobs waiting for him all about the place at any price per hour he cared to charge, and old age pensions paid regularly to himself and wife—paused to shake his head and sigh over the misfortunes of the times. Eileen was likewise moved. To think of it—unwanted apples! And no one to eat them! She reverted to the phenomenon several times that day, with such queries as these:—If eating one apple turns the cow’s milk to vinegar, would eating fifty turn it to cider? If so, wouldn’t it be cheaper to make the cow grow cider, as the old man said cider had riz to 7_d._ a quart, and milk was only 6_d._ You would then make a penny a quart profit that you could put into the Savings Bank to help the War. After watching some vegecultural operations she inquired: “Why is it, when he puts potatoes in the ground and beans in the ground all the same way, the beans come out at the top of the plant and the potatoes come out at the bottom?” Another time it was: “What do they use the sting of the nettle for?” And when she had enlarged her garden vocabulary, she inquired: “Is a spider an annual or a perennial?” “I can’t find a tap out there to turn off the water,” and she indicated the spring outside the gate, tumbling out of a little wooden trough wedged in among the rocks, into a pool below. “I suppose they stop it at the main. What time do they turn it off? . . . _Never?_ It runs like that always! Then how long is it before the whole lot runs away and it’s all dried up? And don’t they ever come down on you for wasting the water?” * * * * * Yet more accomplished people than Eileen have often surprised one by their ignorance. An experienced and supposed-to-be-highly-qualified cook came to me one day with the sad news that we couldn’t have any stuffing with the duck for dinner that day as there wasn’t a single bottle of herbs in the house. I reminded her that there was an almost unlimited amount of everything in the garden, including a sage bush growing on a wall that now measures 15 feet by 6 feet. “In the garden?” she repeated in surprise. “But I didn’t know it was good unless it was bottled! You don’t mean that country people use those things raw?” I felt such an apologetic cannibal as I explained!