“I thank you, sir, I thank you,” said the hobbler, with pleasant frankness.  “A man isn’t much use when he can’t even keep his pipe in his mouth, to say nothing of picking it up when it drops; what do you think, sir?”

Dymchurch talked with him.  The man had spent his life as a gardener, and now for a couple of years, invalided by age and rheumatism, had lived in this cottage on a pension.  His daughter, a widow, dwelt with him, but was away working nearly the whole of the day.  He got along very well, but one thing there was that grieved him, the state of his little garden.  Through the early summer he had been able to look after it as usual, pottering among the flowers and the vegetables for an hour or two each day; but there came rainy weather, and with it one of his attacks, and the garden was now so overgrown with weeds that it “hurt his eyes,” it really did, to look that way.  The daughter dug potatoes and gathered beans as they were wanted, but she had neither time nor strength to do more.

Interested in a difficulty such as he had never imagined, Dymchurch went up to the garden-wall, and viewed the state of things.  Indeed, it was deplorable.  Thistles, docks, nettles, wild growths innumerable, were choking the flowers in which the old man so delighted.  But the garden was such a small one that little trouble and time would be needed to put it in order.

“Will you let me do it for you?” he asked, good-naturedly.  “It’s just the kind of job I should like.”

“You, sir!” cried the old fellow, all but again losing his pipe in astonishment.  “Ho, ho!  That’s a joke indeed!”

Without another word, Dymchurch opened the wicket, flung off his coat, and got to work.  He laboured for more than an hour, the old man leaning on the wall and regarding him with half-ashamed, half-amused countenance.  They did not talk much, but, when he had begun to perspire freely, Dymchurch looked at his companion, and said: 

“Now here’s a thing I never thought of.  Neglect your garden for a few weeks, and it becomes a wilderness; nature conquers it back again.  Think what that means; how all the cultivated places of the earth are kept for men only by ceaseless fighting with nature, year in, year out.”

“And that’s true, sir, that’s true.  I’ve thought of it sometimes, but then I’m a gardener, you see, and it’s my business, as you may say, to have such thoughts.”

“It’s every man’s business,” returned Dymchurch, supporting himself on his hoe, and viewing the uprooted weeds.  “I never realised as in this half-hour at the cost of what incessant labour the earth is kept at man’s service.  If I have done you a good turn, you have done me a better.”

And he hoed vigorously at a root of dandelion.