As time went on and the autocrat’s steps grew steadier, the white coach was abandoned, and whenever he could the late occupant thereof escaped from the white-clad attendant and assisted Williams in his horticultural operations—a course which he found infinitely preferable to going walks with his nurse upon the high road. He upset all Williams’s most cherished theories, and, not infrequently, his practice. He insisted upon helping to wheel manure from the stable-yard to the potato patch, and fell into the manure-heap. He hung on to a big water-can that Williams was carrying with such force that he spilled most of the contents over himself, and he persisted in digging in such close proximity to Williams that the senior gardener was fain to rest upon his spade and admire his assistant. He possessed a garden of his own, a chaotic piece of ground in which might be found specimens of everything growing in the larger garden all mixed up anyhow. That Williams, who but a few short years ago had objected to innocent crocuses upon a green bank, should, with his own hands, have planted a beetroot cheek by jowl with a Michaelmas daisy, and allowed a potato to flower in close proximity to a columbine, seems incredible. But so it was. "Bless ’is ’eart, ’e do like a bit of everythink," Williams would say, wagging his head and beaming at the autocrat, who chattered incessantly in the high, clear little voice that Williams found so easy to hear. The young missus profited by the subjugation of Williams to do sundry bits of gardening on her own account which he never discovered. As for the "professor gen’leman," as the cottage children called him, he bowed beneath the yoke of the autocrat with equal meekness. It is said that a fellow-feeling makes us wondrous kind, and it is certain that Williams and his master understood each other perfectly as regards this one subject. In exchange for his instruction in gardening the autocrat occasionally essayed to teach Williams grammar. "You mustn’t say ’he were,’ Williams; you must say ’he was.’ It’s ’he was; we were.’ Do you understand?" "Well, no, Mazter Billy, I can’t say as I do; but I’ll say ’we was’ if it do please you." "No, no, Williams. ’We were.’" "What do us wear, Mazter Billy?" Williams would interpose, resting on his spade and smiling broadly at his own wit; while the autocrat broke into delighted laughter, and the grammar lesson came to an end for that day.