It was a long white building of many piazzas and many wings, set on a bluff looking over the Sound, with a broad stretch of silken lawn, and about it gardens in their June glory, and behind the house a couple of hundred acres of scrub pine.
On the following day, according to a plan that had been worked out between Larry and Miss Sherwood, Joe Ellison appeared at Cedar Crest and was given the assistant gardener's cottage which stood apart on the bluff some three hundred yards east of the house.

He was a tall, slightly bent, white-haired man, apparently once a man of physical strength and dominance of character and with the outer markings of a gentleman, but now seemingly a mere shadow of the forceful man of his prime.

As a matter of fact, Joe Ellison had barely escaped that greatest of prison scourges, tuberculosis.
The roses were given over to his care.

For a few brief years during the height of his prosperity he had owned a small place in New Jersey and during that period had seemingly been the country gentleman.

Flowers had been his hobby; so that now he could have had no work which would have more suited him than this guardianship of the roses.