"'Fresh as your own lavender,' I says, and then we laughs as usual, and sat down to look at the ships, wondering whether they were transports, or Red Cross, or men-of-war, as they lay along the horizon. Sometimes we'd see an air-plane. They used to buzz up and down that coast all day; and Cap'n Ellis would begin comparing it through his glass with the dragon flies that flickered over his gilly-flowers. There was a southwest wind blowing in from the sea over his garden, and it brought us big puffs of scent from the flowers. "'Hour after hour,' he says, 'day after day, sometimes for weeks I've known the southwest wind to blow like that. It's the wind that wrecked the Armada,' he says, 'and, though it comes gently to my garden, you'd think it would blow all the scents out of the flowers in a few minutes. But it don't,' he says. 'The more the wind blows, the more sweetness they give out,' he says. 'Have you ever considered,' he says, 'how one little clump of wild thyme will go on pouring its heart out on the wind? Where does it all come from?' "I was always a bit awkward when questions like that were put to me; so--just to turn him off like--I says 'Consider the lilies of the field.' "'Ah,' he says, turning to me with his eyes shining. 'That's the way to look at it.' I heard him murmuring another text under his breath, 'Come, thou south, and blow upon my garden.' And he shook hands with me when I said good-bye, as if I'd shown him my feelings, which made me feel I wasn't treating him right, for I'd only said the first thing that came into my mind, owing to my awkwardness at such times. "Well, it was always disturbing me to think what might happen to Cap'n Ellis, if one day he should find his garden slipping away to the beach. It overhung quite a little already; and there had been one or two big falls of chalk a few hundred yards away. Some said that the guns at sea were shaking down the loose boulders. "Of course, he was an old man now, three score years and ten, at least; and my own belief was that if his garden went, he would go with it. The parish council was very anxious to save a long strip of the cliff adjoining his garden, because it was their property; and they'd been building a stone wall along the beach below to protect it from the high tide. But they were going to stop short of Cap'n Ellis's property, because of the expense, and he couldn't afford to do it himself. A few of us got together in the _Plough_ and tried to work out a plan of carrying on the wall, by mistake, about fifteen feet further, which was all it needed. We'd got the foreman on our side, and it looked as if we should get it done at the council's expense after all, which was hardly honest, no doubt, in a manner of speaking, though Cap'n Ellis knew nothing about it.