There was an orchard also, with old gnarled, green-mossed trees, that bore little fruit, but made a glory of shade in the dog-days.  Up among the branches Jiminy made a platform, like those Jaikie read to him about in a book of Indian travel, where the hunters waited for tigers to come underneath them.  Ever since Jaikie became lame he lived at the manse, and the minister let him read all sorts of queer books all day long, if so he wished.  As for Jiminy, he had been brought up among books, and cared little about them; but Jaikie looked upon each one as a new gate of Paradise.

“You never can tell,” said Jaikie to Jiminy; “backs are deceivin’, likewise names.  I’ve looked in ever so many books by the man that wrote Robinson Crusoe, and there’s not an island in any of them.”

“Books are all stuff,” said Jiminy.  “Let’s play ‘Tiger.’”

“Well,” replied Jaikie, “any way, it was out of a book I got ‘Tiger.’”

So Jaikie mounted on the platform, and they began to play ‘Tiger.’  This is how they played it.  Jaikie had a bow and arrow, and he watched and waited silently up among the green leaves till Jiminy came, crawling as softly beneath as the tiger goes pit-pat in his own jungles.  Then Jaikie drew the arrow to a head, and shot the tiger square on the back.  With a mighty howl the beast sprang in the air, as though to reach Jaikie.  But brave Jaikie only laughed, and in a moment the tiger fell on his back, pulled up its trouser-legs, and expired.  For that is the way tigers always do.  They cannot expire without pulling up their trouser-legs.  If you do not believe me, ask the man at the Zoo.

Now, as the former story tells, it was Jaikie who used always to do what Jiminy bade him; but after Jaikie was hurt, helping Jiminy’s father to keep his church and manse, it was quite different.  Jiminy used to come to Jaikie and say, “What shall we do to-day?” And then he used to wheel his friend in a little carriage the village joiner made, and afterwards carry him among the orchard trees to the place he wanted to go.

“Jiminy,” said Jaikie, “the flowers are bonnie in the plots, but they are a’ prisoners.  Let us make a place where they can grow as they like.”

Perhaps he thought of himself laid weak and lonely, when the green world without was all a-growing and a-blowing.

“Bring some of the flowers up to this corner,” said Jaikie, the lame boy.  And it was not long till Jiminy brought them.  The ground was baked and dry, however, and soon they would have withered, but that Jaikie issued his commands, and Jiminy ran for pails upon pails of water from the little burn where now the water had stopped flowing, and only slept black in the pools with a little green scum over them.

“I can’t carry water all night like this,” said Jiminy at last.  “I suppose we must give up this wild garden here in the corner of the orchard.”

“No,” said Jaikie, rubbing his lame ankle where it always hurt, “we must not give it up, for it is our very own, and I shall think about it to-night between the clock-strikes.”