With a clumsy blood-red pottery candlestick, which was so careless in detail as to seem to be the unconscious production of a drunken master-potter, the gardener found his room. (I know it is a shock to you to find it bedtime at this point, but the gardener and I forgot to notice those parts of the day which I have not mentioned.) He dreamt of red hair, redder than natural, as red as a sunset, seen at close quarters from Paradise. At midnight he awoke, in the clutch of perfectly irrelevant thoughts. The room was a velvet cube, with the window plastered at one side of it, a spangled square. And the silken moonlight was draped across the floor. “I am myself,” said the gardener. “I am my world. Nothing matters except me. I am the creator and the created.” With which happy thought he returned to sleep again. The Red Place lost its flame-like life at night. Night, that blind angel, has no dealings with colour, and turns even the auburn of the pine-trunks to cold silver. But before the gardener awoke again, the sun had roused the gods of the place to discover the theft of their red gold, and to replace it. The gardener, as he trilled like a lark in one of the red-tiled bathrooms, was suddenly reminded that he was a merry vagabond. “I must disappear,” he thought. “No true vagabond ever says, ‘Good-bye, and thank you for my pleasant visit.’” So he prepared to disappear. From his bedroom window he could see, as he dressed, the pale head of Mr. Samuel Rust on a far fir-crowned slope, looking away over the green land towards London, waiting, side by side with the divine. The gardener took three slices of dry bread from the breakfast which waited expectantly on a table in the hall, and went out. But under a gorse bush amongst the heather, he found some tiny scarlet flowers. He picked two or three, and returning put them on the breakfast plate of Mr. Samuel Rust. He put a halfpenny there too. “Very vagabondish—tra-la-la ...” he murmured tunefully, and studied the infinitesimal effect with his head on one side. Then he disappeared. He did it straightforwardly along the open road, as the best vagabonds do, and he was pleased with his fidelity to the part. Presently he recalled for the first time Mr. Samuel Rust’s promise of a happy suggestion for that morning. For a moment he wondered, for a second he regretted, but he posed as being devoid of curiosity. This is a good pose, for in time it comes true. It eventually withers the little silly tentacles which at first it merely ignores. Curiosity needs food as much as any of us, and dies soon if denied it. And I am glad, for it seems to me that curiosity and spite are very closely akin, and that spite is very near to the bottom of the pit.