"A great, a lofty gentleman! . . . You'll excuse me, cavalier, but I am not always nor altogether an ass--and I say to you that half a dozen such knights would rejuvenate Christendom. As it is, we live in the last worst ages when the breed can afford but one phoenix at a time, and he must perforce spend himself on forlorn hopes. Mark you, I say 'spend,' not 'waste': the seed of such examples cannot be wasted--" 'Only the actions of the just Smell sweet and blossom in the dust:' nay, not their actions only, but their every high thought which either fate froze or fortune and circumstance choked before it could put forth flower. Did I ever tell you, Cavalier, the Story of My Father and the Jobbing Gardener?" "Not that I remember," said I. "Yet it is full of instruction as an egg is full of meat. My father, who (let me remind you) is a wholesale dealer in flash jewellery, had ever a passion for gardening, albeit that for long he had neither the time nor the money nor even the space to indulge his hobby. His garden--a parallelogram of seventy-two feet by twenty-three, confined by brick walls--lay at the back of our domicile, which excluded all but the late afternoon sunshine. As the Mantuan would observe--" 'nec fertilis illa juvencis, Nec Cereri opportuna seges, nec commoda Baccho.' To attend to it my father employed, on Wednesdays and Saturdays, an old fellow over whose head some sixty-five summers had passed without imparting to it a single secret. In short, he was the very worst gardener in West Bromicheham, and so obstinately, so insufferably, opinionated withal that one day, in a fit of irritation, my father slew him with his own spade. "This done, he had at once to consider how to dispose of the body. Our garden, as I have said, was confined within brick walls, two long and one short; and this last my father had screened with a rustic shed and a couple of laurel-bushes; that from his back-parlour window, where he sat and smoked his pipe on a Sunday afternoon, he might watch the path 'wandering,' as he put it, 'into the shrubbery,' and feast his eyes on a domain which extended not only further than the arm could stretch, but even a little further than the eye could reach. "In the space, then, intervening between the laurels and the terminal wall my father dug a grave two spits deep and interred the corpse, covering it with a light compost of loam and leaf-mould. This was on a Wednesday--the second Wednesday in July, as he was always particular to mention. (And I have heard him tell the story a score of times.)