On this occasion, however, I've listened with great patience to all your objections--" "Not a tithe of 'em." "They're all you'll have a chance of making, at any rate.

And I answer them thus: If the worst comes to the worst, I'll cover the whole of this property with a couple of tubs, one to catch rain-water and t'other filled with garden mould.

If the sea rots 'em, I'll have the whole estate careened, and its bottom pitched and its seams stopped with oakum.

I'll rig up a battery here, and if the water-butt runs dry you shall blaze away at the guns till you fetch the rain down, as I've seen it fetched down before now by a cannonade.

But I mean to have a garden here, and a garden I'll have." Faithful to this resolve, Captain Barker set to work to study the art in which Tristram was to be instructed, and, being by nature a hater of superficiality, determined to begin by acquainting himself with everything that had been written about the nature and habits of plants from the earliest ages to that present day.