Mr. Basket welcomed the Major cordially, with a dozen rallying
comments on his healthy rural complexion, and carried him off to
admire the garden while Mrs. Basket enlarged her preparations for
dinner at five o'clock.
The garden was indeed calculated to excite admiration, less for its
flowers--for Mr. Basket confessed ruefully that very few flowers
would grow with him--than for a hundred ingenuities by which this
defect was concealed.
"And the beauty of it is," announced Mr. Basket, with a wave of his
hand towards a black-and-white edging compound of marrow bones and
the inverted bases of wine bottles, disposed alternately, "it
harbours no slugs. It saves labour, too; you would be surprised at
the sum it used to cost me weekly in labour alone. But," he went
on, "I pin my faith to oyster shells. They are, if in a nautical
town one may be permitted to speak breezily, my sheet anchor."
He indicated a grotto at the end of the walk. "Maria and me did the
whole of that."
"Mrs. Basket is fond of gardening?" hazarded the Major.
"She's extraordinary partial to oysters," Mr. Basket corrected him.
"We made it a principle from the first to use nothing but what we
consumed in the house. That don't apply to the statuary, of course,
which I have purchased at one time and another from an Italian dealer
who frequents the Hoe. The material is less durable than one might
wish; but I could not afford marble.
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