Page:Cornelia Meigs--The Pool of Stars.djvu/56

 had not Miss Miranda warned her that there must be a little space left for beets and carrots and sweet corn.

Old Michael Martin, bent and weatherbeaten, the hero of the tale she had heard on her first visit, was at work spading the far end of the garden. He seemed a silent, crabbed person, who did not like to answer even when spoken to, so that Betsey found him rather disappointing. He would stop his work now and then, however, to hurl a few words of rather bewildering advice at the two among the bean rows.

"If you are to plant lettuce again.. Miss Miranda," he remarked suddenly, standing with both hands resting on his spade, "you had best be doing it to-day. It is the very last of the light of the moon."

"What does he mean?" inquired Elizabeth in an undertone when he had gone on with his work again. She had no notion that moonlight need be considered in the matter of growing vegetables.

"He thinks that everything in a garden goes by signs and wonders," Miss Miranda answered. "He says charms for luck when he puts in the cabbage plants, and he thinks that if the first peas are not sown on Saint Patrick's Day, they will none of them come up at all. It is high time to set out the onions to-day, but he would be so disturbed at putting them in before the dark of the moon that I have not the