But one day, towards the end of the month, but before the bulbs were all done, Julia went into the town.

Captain Polkington saw her start; then he wandered to the shed where Johnny was at work.  For a little he stood watching, then he walked leisurely round the place looking at this and that.

“You will never be able to tell which is which of these things,” he remarked at last.

Johnny looked at his somewhat conspicuous labels.  “I’ve named them, don’t you see ‘Tulips?’”

“But you don’t say what sort of tulips, which are red and which yellow.  Nor what sort of narcissus, which are daffodils and which the bunchy things.”

“No,” Mr. Gillat admitted; “no, they got mixed in the digging up; I forgot, and put them all in the barrow together; that’s how it happened.”

“What?  The whole lot?” the Captain inquired.  “The streaked daffodil and all?  What did Julia say?”

“She said it did not matter,” Johnny told him; “they’ll be all the more surprise to us when they come up next year.”

“She didn’t mind, not even about the streaked daffodil?”

“Oh, that was not there,” Mr. Gillat said, serenely unconscious that the fate of that bulb was the only interest.  “We have got that by itself.”

He showed a little piece of shelf penned off from the rest and carefully covered with wire netting for fear of rats.  Three different shaped bulbs were there in a row.

“That’s it,” Johnny said, pointing to one of the three.  “And that end one is the red tulip with the black middle; it is supposed to be very good; and that other is the double blue hyacinth from down by the gate; we are going to try it in a pot in the house next year and have it bloom early.”

Captain Polkington nodded, but did not show much interest.  “Did you put these here, or did she?” he asked.

“She did,” Johnny answered.  “She cleans them much better than I do, and we knew they were choice ones, the best one of each kind, so she cleaned them; but I made the wire cover.”

The Captain did not praise the ingenuity of this contrivance, which he did not admire at all, and soon afterwards he sauntered back to the house.  He was dozing in the easy-chair in the front kitchen when Johnny came in to change his coat before setting out to meet Julia.  He did not seem to have moved much when Mr. Gillat came down-stairs ready to start.

“What?” he roused himself to say when Johnny announced his destination.  “Oh, all right, you need not have waked me to tell me that, it really is of no importance to me if you like to walk in the blazing sun.”  He settled himself afresh in the chair, muttering something about the heat, and Johnny went out, quietly closing the door after him.

It was an hour later when Julia and the faithful Johnny came back, the latter decidedly hot although he was carrying one of the lightest of the parcels.  Captain Polkington was still in his chair; he woke up as they entered.