He was aged and decrepit; his muscles seemed able to
perform their appointed tasks only through the accumulated inertia of
a patiently toilsome life in the same tracks. Apparently they would
have collapsed had he tried to force them to aught else than the
holding of the ploughshare, the pulling of weeds, the digging around
the roots of flowers, and the planting of seeds.
Every autumn he seemed about to totter to his fall among the fading
flowers; every spring it was like Death himself urging on the
resurrection; but he lived on year after year, and tended well
Evelina's garden, and the gardens of other maiden-women and widows in
the village. He was taciturn, grubbing among his green beds as
silently as a worm, but now and then he warmed a little under a fire
of questions concerning Evelina's garden. "Never see none sech
flowers in nobody's garden in this town, not sence I knowed 'nough to
tell a pink from a piny," he would mumble. His speech was thick; his
words were all uncouthly slurred; the expression of his whole life
had come more through his old knotted hands of labor than through his
tongue. But he would wipe his forehead with his shirt-sleeve and lean
a second on his spade, and his face would change at the mention of
the garden. Its wealth of bloom illumined his old mind, and the roses
and honeysuckles and pinks seemed for a second to be reflected in his
bleared old eyes.
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