Page:Carroll Rankin--Dandelion Cottage.djvu/291

 Rh  there had been unexpected delays, but just a week from the day the Milligans had left the cottage, Mr. Black returned.

Without even stopping to look in at his own office, the traveller went straight to the rectory to ask for Bettie. Bettie, Mrs. Tucker told him, he would probably find in the cottage yard.

Mr. Black took a short cut through the hole in the back fence, arriving on the cottage lawn just in time to meet a procession of girls entering the front gate. Each girl was carrying a huge, heavy clod of earth, out of the top of which grew a sturdy green plant; for the cottageless cottagers had discovered the only successful way of performing the difficult feat of re-stocking their garden with half-grown vegetables. Their neighbours had proved generous when Bettie had explained that if one could only dig deep enough one could transplant anything, from a cabbage to pole-beans. Some of the grown-up gardeners, to be sure, had been