“A certain number of travellers came to Ephesus, whom MacPherson regarded with a patient disdain, but whom I welcomed as messengers of the outside world. I wanted to question them, but they were always so eager to question me, making me into a sort of guide, and inveigling me into doing them the honours of the place. This used to annoy MacPherson, though he never said anything; I think he felt it as a sort of desecration. I could see him watching me with disapproval, standing there among the columns in his dust-coloured shirt and trousers and sombrero hat, leaning his hands on the handle of his pick-axe, a hard, muscular man, thin and wiry as an Australian bush-settler. The tourists questioned me about him and about our life, but I noticed they rarely approached him, or, if they did so once, they did not do so twice. After talking to me, they would move away, decide—thankfully—among themselves that I could not be offered a tip, and finally would stroll off in the direction of our little house. Here I had dug a little garden in imitation of the Kentish cottages I knew so well; just a few narrow beds in front of the house, where I had collected the many wild flowers that grew on the neighbouring hills. MacPherson took an odd, unexpected interest in my garden. He brought me contributions, rare orchids and cyclamen which my eyes had missed, brought them to me gravely, carrying them cupped in his hands with as much tenderness as a child carries a nest full of eggs. He stood by me silently watching when I put them in with my trowel in the cool of the evening. Of course we got terribly burnt up in the summer, but in the spring my garden was always merry, and, if it added to my homesickness, it also helped to palliate it. “MacPherson had evidently never thought of making the place less dreary than it naturally was; I have no great idea of comfort myself, but I can’t live without flowers, and so my instinct, which began in a garden, produced itself into other improvements; I bought a mongrel puppy off a shepherd, and its jolly little bark of welcome used to cheer our home-coming in the evening; then I made MacPherson bring back some chickens from Smyrna, a suggestion which seemed to horrify him, but to which he made no objection; finally I grew some flowers in pots and stood them in the windows. Oh, I won’t disguise my real purpose from you: I was trying to make that rickety Turkish house as like a Kentish cottage as possible. I even paved a garden path—MacPherson examined every stone with the minutest care before I was allowed to lay it down—and finished it off with a swing-gate. Then it struck me that a swing-gate in mid-hill-side looked merely absurd, so I contrived a square of wooden fencing all round our little property. Lastly, I hung a horse-shoe, which was a mule-shoe really, over the door.