Page:Robert Barr - Lord Stranleigh Philanthropist.djvu/154

 the five hundred, it will be unnecessary to read further."

"Not so, my dear Blake. You cannot evade your duties by any such plea as that. Every letter must at least be glanced at, and if there are other suggestions that please me, I will pay the promised price for them."

"I don't see where I am to get the time."

"You'll be busy for a week or two while plans are being drawn, and contracts let, but after that the long winter is at your disposal. There goes the luncheon bell. Let us to our trenchers. This sea air has made me hungry."

As a matter of fact the new monastery was inaugurated on the first of March, instead of the first of April. The instructing gardener had informed his ignorant employer that April was altogether too late in the year to begin horticultural work. He himself, with a staff of hired labourers, set to work in the middle of February making preparations for the campaign, ploughing the land that was to produce three hundred and forty bushels of wheat, that is, eight-and-a-half bushels for each man, to be grown in a field of fourteen acres, since the head gardener scouted the idea of each man