"'It was a quarter of a mile inland,' he says, 'when Polly and me first came to live here; and it hasn't touched my garden yet. It never will touch it,' he says, 'not while I'm alive. There are good break-waters down below, and it will last me my time. Perhaps the trees won't grow to their full height, but I shan't be here to see,' he says, 'and it's not the trees I'm thinking about. It's the garden. They don't have to be very tall to shelter my garden. As for the sea,' he says, 'it's my window, my _bay_-window, and I hope you see the joke. If I was inland, with four hedges around my garden, instead of three,' he says, 'it would be like living in a house without a window. Three hedges and a big blue bay-window, that's the garden for me,' he says. "And so he planted it full of every kind of flowers that he could grow. He had sweet Williams, and larkspurs, and old man's beard, and lavender, and gilly-flowers, and a lot of them old-fashioned sweet-smelling flowers, with names that he used to say were like church-bells at evening, in the old villages, out of reach of the railway-lines. "And they all had a meaning to him which others didn't know. You might walk with him for a whole summer's afternoon in his garden, but it seemed as if his flowers kept the sweetest part of their scents for old Cap'n Ellis. He'd pick one of them aromatic leaves, and roll it in his fingers, and put it to his nose and say 'Ah,' like as if he was talking to his dead sweetheart. "'It's a strange thing,' he'd say, 'but when she was alive, I was away at sea for fully three parts of the year. We always talked of the time when I'd retire from the sea. We thought we'd settle down together in our garden and watch the ships. But, when that time came, it was her turn to go away, and it's my turn to wait. But there's a garden where we meet,' he'd say, 'and that's the garden you've never seen.' "There was one little patch, on the warmest and most sheltered side that he called his wife's garden; and it was this that I thought he meant. It was just about as big as her grave, and he had little clusters of her favorite flowers there--rosemary, and pansies and Canterbury bells, and her name _Ruth_, done very neat and pretty in Sussex violets. It came up every year in April, like as if the garden was remembering. "Parson considered that Cap'n Ellis was a very interesting man. "'He's quite a philosopher,' he said to me one day; and I suppose that was why the old chap talked so queer at times. "One morning, after the war broke out, I'd taken some mackerel up to Cap'n Ellis. "'Are you quite sure they're fresh,' he said, the same as he always did, though they were always a free gift to him. But he meant no offense.