Then he hesitated, and looked at me quickly for a second. Then he threw down the spade and said, quietly: "I'll go get that rotted stump dirt before I break ground for the lilacs, and you can think about things while you wait." With that he lifted the wheelbarrow and trundled out of the situation, leaving me in the depths of a hurt uncertainty. But if Samuel Foster Crittenden thought I was as stupid as that, he had a chance to learn better--at least I thought I would give him one. I'm not sure yet that I did. As soon as he was out of sight I flew to the end of the garden, where I thought the row of hollyhocks would make a lovely background for all the long lines of vegetables and flowers running into it, sighted with my eye, ran a trench with the rusty old hoe, flung in my seeds, and covered it up in less time than it takes to tell it. When Sam came back I had spaded out at least two and a half shovelfuls of dirt, that I found surprisingly heavy, from the hole for the first lilac. I saw him start and hesitate as if about to say something, and then I think--I think, but I can't be sure--his eyes rested on my hasty and surreptitious gardening. "You are the real thing, Betty," was all he said as he roughed my hair, first back and then down over my eyes, and took Grandmother Nelson's spade from my hand and began to make the dirt fly out of the hole. I wonder what I'll say when those hollyhocks come up. And then we all worked. It astonished me to find what one man, one woman, and one small boy can do to a plot of earth in three hours, with a string, sharpened sticks, seed, hoes, spades, rakes, and radiant happiness. At four o'clock we all three sank down in a heap at the end of the last row of green peas in delicious exhaustion. "Nice little seed, I'll dig you up to-morrow to see how you feel," said the Byrd as he patted in a stray pea he had found with the beets. "I can't dig you all up, but I will as many as I can." "Yes, you will--not," said Sam, reaching for him as he skimmed and dipped away. And then followed a lecture on floriculture, agriculture, and horticulture that I immensely enjoyed. "Yes," assented the fledgling, with the greatest intellectual enthusiasm, "baby beets folds up jest that way," and he illustrated after Sam, with his grubby little paddies, "same as chickens in eggs and--" "Come on, Betty, let's go select the spot for the cedar-log temple for Peter's muses," Sam interrupted as he made a lightning grab for the Byrd and tumbled him back into the loamy earth.