It had been raining, but the sun had come out. We wandered round the paths together, and I can see her old face now, lined and seamed with years of anxious toil and struggle; her long, bony arms, slightly withered, but moving restlessly in the direction of snails and slugs. “O dear! O dear!” she was saying. “What with the dogs, and the cats, and the snails, and the trains, it’s wonderful anything comes up at all!” Mrs. Ward’s garden has a character of its own, and I cannot account for it. There is nothing very special growing—a few pansies and a narrow border of London Pride, several clumps of unrecognizable things that haven’t flowered, the grass patch in only fair order, and at the end of the garden an unfinished rabbit-hutch. But there is about Mrs. Ward’s garden an atmosphere. There is something about it that reflects her placid eye, the calm, somewhat contemplative way she has of looking right through things, as though they didn’t concern her too closely. As though, in fact, she were too occupied with her own inner visions. “No,” she says in answer to my query, “we don’t mind the trains at all. In fact, me and my Tom we often come out here and sit after supper. And Tom smokes his pipe. We like to hear the trains go by.” She gazes abstractedly at the embankment. “I like to hear things ... going on and that. It’s Dalston Junction a little further on. The trains go from there to all parts, right out into the country they do ... ever so far.... My Ernie went from Dalston.” She adds the last in a changed tone of voice. And now perhaps we come to the most important vision of all—Mrs. Ward’s vision of “my Ernie.” I ought perhaps to mention that I had never met “my Ernie.” I can only see him through Mrs. Ward’s eyes. At the time when I met her, he had been away at the war for nearly a year. I need hardly say that “my Ernie” was a paragon of sons. He was brilliant, handsome, and incredibly clever. Everything that “my Ernie” said was treasured. Every opinion that he expressed stood. If “my Ernie” liked any one, that person was always a welcome guest. If “my Ernie” disliked any one they were not to be tolerated, however plausible they might appear. I had seen Ernie’s photograph, and I must confess that he appeared a rather weak, extremely ordinary-looking young man, but then I would rather trust to Mrs. Ward’s visions than the art of any photographer.