But to return to the now thoroughly dry Poppy.  We determined to sell her, in spite of the fact that we never are very successful in selling anything.  Things always seem at their bottom price when we have something to dispose of, while we usually buy when the demand outruns the supply.  Still, I once conducted several quite successful transactions with an antique dealer in Pennsylvania.  I think I was said to be the only living woman who had ever gotten the best of a bargain with him, so I was unanimously elected by the family as the one to open negotiations.  A customer actually appeared.  We gradually approached a price by the usual stages, I dwelling on his advantage in having the calf and trying not to let him see my carking fear that we might be the unwilling godparents of it if he didn’t hurry up and come to terms.  At last the matter was settled.  I abandoned my last five-dollar ditch, thinking that the relief of seeing the last of Poppy would be cheap at the price.  There were four of us, and we would not hesitate to pay two dollars each for theatre tickets, which would be eight dollars, so really I was saving money.

A nice little girl with flaxen pigtails brought her father’s check.  She and her brother tied Poppy behind their buggy and slowly disappeared down the hill.  There was the flutter of a handkerchief from the other side of the canyon, and that was all.

In the words of that disturbing telegram: 

“Salve atque vale.”

[Illustration]

GARDENERS

    “Venite agile, barchetta mia
     Santa Lucia, Santa Lucia!”

accompanied by the enchanting fragrance of burning sage-brush, is wafted up to my sleeping-porch, and I know that Signor Constantino Garibaldi is early at work clearing the canyon side so that our Matilija poppies shall not be crowded out by the wild.  It is a pleasant awakening to a pleasant world as the light morning mist melts away from a bay as “bright and soft and bloomin’ blue” as any Kipling ever saw.  It seems almost too good to be true, that in a perfect Italian setting we should have stumbled on an Italian gardener, who whistles Verdi as he works.  True, he doesn’t know the flowers by name, and in his hands a pair of clippers are as fatal as the shears in the hands of Atropos, but he is in the picture.  When I see gardeners pruning I realize that that lady of destiny shows wonderful restraint about our threads of fate—­the temptation to snip seems so irresistible.

Signor Garibaldi is a retired wine merchant driven out-of-doors by illness, a most courteous and sensitive soul, with a talent for letter-writing that is alone worth all the plumbago blossoms that he cut away last year.  The following letter was written to J——­ while Garibaldi was in charge of our hill-top, the bareness of which we strove to cover with wild flowers until we could make just the kind of garden we wanted: