Tom had built a comfortable white house, over whose verandah honeysuckles and roses soon clambered and hung. In time the ground enclosed about it had a curious likeness to the bowery unrestraint of the garden he had played in during his childhood. It was a pleasure to him to lay it out on the old plan and to plant japonicas, flowering almonds, and syringa bushes, as they had grown in the days when he had played under them as a child, or lounged on the grass near them as a boy. He and Sheba planted everything themselves--or, rather, Sheba walked about with him or stood by his side and talked while he worked. In time she knew almost as well as he did the far-away garden he took as his model. She learned to know the place by heart. "Were you a little boy then, Uncle Tom?" she would say, "when there was a mock-orange and a crape myrtle next to the big yellow rose-bush?" There were even times when he found her memory was better than his own, and she could correct him. "Ah! no, Uncle Tom," she would say; "the pansies were not in the little heart-shaped bed; they were all round the one with the pink harp-flower in the middle." When she was six years old he sent for some books and began seriously to work with a view to refreshing his memory on subjects almost forgotten. "I'm preparing myself for a nursery governess, Sheba," he said. "What we want is a nursery governess, and I don't know where to find one. I shouldn't know how to manage her if I did find her, so I've got to post up for the position myself." The child was so happy with him in all circumstances, that it was easy to teach her anything. She had learned to read and write before she discovered that the process she went through to acquire these accomplishments was not an agreeable pastime specially invented by Tom for her amusement. At eleven years old she had become so interested in her work that she was quite an excited little student. By the time she was twelve Tom began to shake his head at her. "If you go on like this," he said, "I sha'n't be able to keep up with you, and what I've got to do is to keep ahead. If I can't, I shall have to send you to the Academy at Ralston; and how should we stand that?" She came and sat upon his big knee--a slim little thing, as light as a bird. "We couldn't stand it, Uncle Tom," she said. "We _have_ to be together. We always have been, haven't we?" And she rubbed her ruffled head against his huge breast. "Yes, we always have been," answered Tom; "and it would go pretty hard with us to make a change, Sheba."