Page:Tales of the long bow.pdf/16

 "I hope you're not working on Sunday," said the Colonel, with a much more pleasant smile than most people got from him, though he was always polite to everybody. "You're getting too fond of these rural pursuits. You've become a rustic yokel."

"I was venturing to examine the cabbages, sir," replied the rustic yokel, with a painful precision of articulation. "Their condition yesterday evening did not strike me as satisfactory."

"Glad you didn't sit up with them," answered the Colonel. "But it's lucky you're interested in cabbages. I want to talk to you about cabbages."

"About cabbages, sir?" inquired the other respectfully.

But the Colonel did not appear to pursue the topic, for he was gazing in sudden abstraction at another object in the vegetable plots in front of him. The Colonel's garden, like the Colonel's house, hat, coat and demeanour, was well-appointed in an unobtrusive fashion; and in the part of it devoted to flowers there dwelt something indefinable that seemed older than the suburbs. The hedges, even, in being as neat as Surbiton managed to look as mellow as Hampton Court, as if their very artificiality belonged rather to Queen Anne than Queen Victoria; and the