Alicia sank upon the ground and rocked to and fro.  For a minute I wanted to catch her by the shoulders and shake her soundly; but catching her eye instead, I also fell into helpless laughter.  Leaning on his spade, Schmetz stared at us, shaking his grizzled head.

“Name of a cat!” murmured the puzzled Alsatian, and fell to salvaging such bulbs as weren’t utterly ruined.  We were all busy at this, when a head again appeared over the hedge—­a big, leonine head with a tossing mane and a tameless beard.  An enormous pair of shoulders followed, a tree-trunk of a leg was swung over, and Doctor Richard Geddes dropped into our garden like a great cat.  He strolled over, hands in pockets, and looking down at grubbing us, asked politely:  “Making a garden?”

“Oh, no,” Alicia told him sweetly, “we’re laying out a chicken-run.”

“Er—­what I came over to say, is that I’ve got some fine bulbs, myself, this year, particularly fine bulbs—­eh, Schmetz?—­and more than I need for myself.  Will you share them with me, Miss Smith?  Please!  I—­well, I’d be really grateful if you would,” said this overgrown boy.

“We’ll be enchanted,” Alicia said instantly.  “When can we have them, please?”

“Now!” cried the doctor, with brightening eyes.  “By jingo, I’ll get ’em this minute, and plant ’em for you, too!”

And he did.  He was on his knees, trowel in hand, shouting to Riedriech, who had come outside for a few minutes’ happy arguing with his good friend the doctor, that the socialist argument boiled down amounts to about this—­that one should do without boiled eggs for breakfast now, in order that the proletariat may have baked hen for dinner in the millennium; which is lunacy; anybody with a modicum of brains—­

“Brains!” snorted Riedriech.  “What is it you know about brains? No doctor knows what is on the inside of brains!  You make tinkerings mit the inside plumbings, Gott bewahre! and cut up womens and cats and such-like poor little dumb beasts and says you, ’Now I know all about the brains of man.’  It is right there where you are wrong, Comrade Geddes!”

“Habet!” said Comrade Geddes.

“Look you,” said the old visionary, with sudden passion, “look you on the little bulb here, so dirty and ugly you hide him in the ground quick.  So!  But by and by comes up green shoots, and blossoms.  So it is with the great thoughts of men, the deep race-thoughts, Comrade Geddes—­seeds, bulbs, germs, all of them, in the ugly husks of the common people.  Out of our muck and grime they come, the little green shoots which the fool will say is poison, maybe, but which the wise know and labor and make room for.  I, Riedriech, and workers like me, we go into our graves nothing but husks.  But it is out of the buried hearts of us comes green things growing; and then—­die Blumen! die Blumen!” said the cabinet-maker, with a still, far-away look.

“And,” he finished, with a sad smile, “it is our flowers that you put in vases of gold on your altars.  And you say, ’Listen:  Jesus the carpenter talks plain words to his fishermen friends.’  And, ’Hush!  Burns the plowman makes songs in the field!’”