Mr. Nowell Corklemore, walking with Rufus Hutton, was, as he was forced to be by a feeble nature enfeebled, a dry and pompous man. “Haw! I am given to understand you have made all this yourself, sir. In me ’umble opeenion, it does you the greatest credit, sir; credit, sir, no less to your heart than to your head. Haw”! Here he pointed with his yellow bamboo at nothing at all in particular. “Everything is in its infancy yet. Wait till the trees grow up a little. I have planted nearly all of them. All except that, and that, and the weeping elm over yonder, where I sit with my wife sometimes. Everything is in its infancy”. “Excuse me; haw! If you will allow me, I would also say, with the exception of something else”. And he looked profoundly mystic. “Oh, the house you mean”, said Rufus. “No, the house is not quite new; built some seven years back”. “Sir, I do not mean the house—but the edifice, haw!—the tenement of the human being. Sir, I mean, except just _this_”. He shut one eye, like a sleepy owl, and tapped the side of his head most sagely; and then he said “Haw”! and looked for approval. And he might have looked a very long time, in his stupidly confident manner, without a chance of getting it; for Rufus Hutton disliked allusions even to age intellectual, when you came to remember that his Rosa was more than twenty years younger. “Ah, yes, now it strikes me”, continued Mr. Corklemore, as they stood in front of the house, “that little bow–window—nay, I am given to understand, that bay–window is the more correct—haw! I mean the more architectural term—I think I should have felt inclined to make that nice bay–window give to the little grass–plot. A mere question, perhaps, of idiosyncrasy, haw”! “Give what”? asked Rufus, now on the foam. That his own pet lawn, which he rolled every day, his lawn endowed with manifold curves and sweeps of his own inventing, with the Wellingtonia upon it, and the plantain dug out with a cheese–knife—that all this should be called a “little grass–plot”, by a fellow who had no two ideas, except in his intonation of “Haw”! “Haw! It does not signify. But the term, I am given to understand, is now the correct and recognised one”. “I wish you were given to understand anything except your own importance”, Rufus muttered savagely, and eyed the yellow bamboo. “Have you—haw! excuse my asking, for you are a great luminary here; have you as yet made trial of the Spergula pilifera”? “Yes; and found it the biggest humbug that ever aped Godʼs grass”. Dr. Hutton was always very sorry when he had used strong language; but being a thin–skinned, irritable, cut–the–corner man, he could not be expected to stand Nowell Corklemoreʼs “haws”.