It is extraordinary what a small child’s tongue can do with an honest English name. Every one has had experience of this fantastic adaptive gift, but none could be more curious than my own. My name is Greville—Julius Greville, M.D., if you please—and if there is a sound less like Greville than “Dombeen” I should like to be told of it; but Dombeen was Rose’s translation of what she so often heard her father call me, and Dombeen I have remained to her. Of all the music in the world none was more sweet to me than her cool clear voice calling “Dombeen! Dombeen!” * * * * * Our gardens were separated only by an old fruit wall with a gate in it, both sides of the gate being equally Rose’s domain; and I used to rejoice when on returning from my rounds I saw her dainty proud little head among the fruit bushes. Briggs, my gardener and my father’s gardener before me, was the happier for her society too, as she circled about him like a robin and never ceased her inquisitorial functions. “Lord, but she do flummox me sometimes,” he would say. “The things that child wants to know! It isn’t only book-learning that’s needed, it’s flower-learning too. It makes me feel that ignorant.” “What sort of things?” “Well, why one flower’s blue and another pink. Man and boy I’ve worked in gardens, and with good head-men over me too when I was learning—Scotchmen and all—but I never heard about that. Never even wondered about it. ‘So as to look prettier in nosegays’ was all I could say; but it must go deeper than that. I told her to ask you, you being a gentleman of learning, but she says, ‘No, no, Briggs, it’s what a gardener ought to know,’ and she’s right. “Here’s some more nuts of hers to crack—‘Why do some flowers have scent and others don’t?’ ‘Who discovered that potatoes are good to eat?’ ‘Who began to put horse-radish with beef?’ ‘Why are butterflies called butterflies?’ Really, sir, you ought to take her on, she makes me seem that ignorant. She won’t ask me the things I do know. The funny part of it is,” Briggs went on, “she doesn’t want to have a garden of her own. Some children are mad about that, but she doesn’t care. All she wants is to walk about among the flowers, or stand by me, and watch and watch.” And off he went. He came back a moment later. “It would be very good of you,” he said, “to try and find out why butterflies are called butterflies. My missis wants to know too.” I remember another of Briggs’ stories of Rose. “The other day,” he said—this was when Rose was about six—“she brought a tooth—the one that you gave her a shilling for if she didn’t cry when she went to have it pulled—and what do you think? She wanted me to plant it for her. Plant it! And what for? So as it would grow into a soldier, as it did in some book they’d been reading to her. “‘A soldier!’ I said, wishing to tease her a little, ‘why a soldier, I should like to know? Why not a gardener?’