good fellowship; but as far as actual experience goes, I have only

met one man in my life who might fitly be quoted in the same breath
with Andrew Fairservice, - though without his vices. He was a man

whose very presence could impart a savour of quaintantiquity to
the baldest and most modern flower-plots. There was a dignity

about his tall stooping form, and an earnestness in his wrinkled
face that recalled Don Quixote; but a Don Quixote who had come

through the training of the Covenant, and been nourished in his
youth on WALKER'S LIVES and THE HIND LET LOOSE.

Now, as I could not bear to let such a man pass away with no sketch
preserved of his old-fashioned virtues, I hope the reader will take

this as an excuse for the present paper, and judge as kindly as he
can the infirmities of my description. To me, who find it so

difficult to tell the little that I know, he stands essentially as
a GENIUS LOCI. It is impossible to separate his spare form and old

straw hat from the garden in the lap of the hill, with its rocks
overgrown with clematis, its shadowy walks, and the splendid

breadth of champaign that one saw from the north-west corner. The
garden and gardener seem part and parcel of each other. When I

take him from his right surroundings and try to make him appear for
me on paper, he looks unreal and phantasmal: the best that I can

say may convey some notion to those that never saw him, but to me
it will be ever impotent.

The first time that I saw him, I fancy Robert was pretty old
already: he had certainly begun to use his years as a stalking

horse. Latterly he was beyond all the impudencies of logic,
considering a reference to the parishregister worth all the

reasons in the world, "I AM OLD AND WELL STRICKEN IN YEARS," he was
wont to say; and I never found any one bold enough to answer the

argument. Apart from this vantage that he kept over all who were
not yet octogenarian, he had some other drawbacks as a gardener.

He shrank the very place he cultivated. The dignity and reduced
gentility of his appearance made the small garden cut a sorry

figure. He was full of tales of greater situations in his younger
days. He spoke of castles and parks with a humbling familiarity.

He told of places where under-gardeners had trembled at his looks,
where there were meres and swanneries, labyrinths of walk and

wildernesses of sad shrubbery in his control, till you could not
help feeling that it was condescension on his part to dress your

humbler garden plots. You were thrown at once into an invidious
position. You felt that you were profiting by the needs of

dignity, and that his poverty and not his will consented to your
vulgar rule. Involuntarily you compared yourself with the

swineherd that made Alfred watch his cakes, or some bloated citizen
who may have given his sons and his condescension to the fallen

Dionysius. Nor were the disagreeables purely fanciful and
metaphysical, for the sway that he exercised over your feelings he

extended to your garden, and, through the garden, to your diet. He
would trim a hedge, throw away a favourite plant, or fill the most

favoured and fertile section of the garden with a vegetable that
none of us could eat, in supremecontempt for our opinion. If you

asked him to send you in one of your own artichokes, "THAT I WULL,
MEM," he would say, "WITH PLEASURE, FOR IT IS MAIR BLESSED TO GIVE

THAN TO RECEIVE." Ay, and even when, by extra twisting of the
screw, we prevailed on him to prefer our commands to his own

inclination, and he went away, stately and sad, professing that
"OUR WULL WAS HIS PLEASURE," but yet reminding us that he would do

it "WITH FEELIN'S," - even then, I say, the triumphant" target="_blank" title="a.胜利的；洋洋得意的">triumphant master felt
humbled in his triumph, felt that he ruled on sufferance only, that

he was taking a mean advantage of the other's low estate, and that
the whole scene had been one of those "slights that patient merit

of the worthy" target="_blank" title="a.不值得的；不足道的">unworthy takes."
In flowers his taste was old-fashioned and catholic; affecting

sunflowers and dahlias, wallflowers and roses and holding in
supreme aversion whatsoever was fantastic, new-fashioned or wild.

There was one exception to this sweeping ban. Foxgloves, though
undoubtedly guilty on the last count, he not only spared, but

loved; and when the shrubbery was being thinned, he stayed his hand
and dexterously manipulated his bill in order to save every stately

stem. In boyhood, as he told me once, speaking in that tone that
only actors and the old-fashioned common folk can use nowadays, his

heart grew "PROUD" within him when he came on a burn-course among
the braes of Manor that shone purple with their graceful trophies;

and not all his apprenticeship and practice for so many years of
precise gardening had banished these boyishrecollections from his

heart. Indeed, he was a man keenly alive to the beauty of all that
was bygone. He abounded in old stories of his boyhood, and kept

pious account of all his former pleasures; and when he went (on a
holiday) to visit one of the fabled great places of the earth where

he had served before, he came back full of little pre-Raphaelite
reminiscences that showed real passion for the past, such as might

have shaken hands with Hazlitt or Jean-Jacques.
But however his sympathy with his old feelings might affect his

liking for the foxgloves, the very truth was that he scorned all
flowers together. They were but garnishings, childish toys,

trifling ornaments for ladies' chimney-shelves. It was towards his
cauliflowers and peas and cabbage that his heart grew warm. His

preference for the more useful growths was such that cabbages were
found invading the flower-pots, and an outpost of savoys was once

discovered in the centre of the lawn. He would prelect over some
thriving plant with wonderful enthusiasm, piling reminiscence on

reminiscence of former and perhaps yet finer specimens. Yet even
then he did not let the credit leave himself. He had, indeed,

raised "FINER O' THEM;" but it seemed that no one else had been
favoured with a like success. All other gardeners, in fact, were

mere foils to his own superior attainments; and he would recount,
with perfect soberness of voice and visage, how so and so had

wondered, and such another could scarcely give credit to his eyes.
Nor was it with his rivals only that he parted praise and blame.

If you remarked how well a plant was looking, he would gravely
touch his hat and thank you with solemn unction; all credit in the

matter falling to him. If, on the other hand, you called his
attention to some back-going vegetable, he would quote Scripture:

"PAUL MAY PLANT AND APOLLOS MAY WATER;" all blame being left to
Providence, on the score of deficient rain or untimely frosts.

There was one thing in the garden that shared his preference with
his favourite cabbages and rhubarb, and that other was the beehive.

Their sound, their industry, perhaps their sweet product also, had
taken hold of his imagination and heart, whether by way of memory

or no I cannot say, although perhaps the bees too were linked to
him by some recollection of Manor braes and his country childhood.

Nevertheless, he was too chary of his personal safety or (let me
rather say) his personal dignity to mingle in any active office

towards them. But he could stand by while one of the contemned
rivals did the work for him, and protest that it was quite safe in

spite of his own considerate distance and the cries of the
distressed assistant. In regard to bees, he was rather a man of

word than deed, and some of his most striking sentences had the
bees for text. "THEY ARE INDEED WONDERFUL CREATURES, MEM," he said

once. "THEY JUST MIND ME O' WHAT THE QUEEN OF SHEBA SAID TO
SOLOMON - AND I THINK SHE SAID IT WI' A SIGH, - 'THE HALF OF IT

HATH NOT BEEN TOLD UNTO ME.'"
As far as the Bible goes, he was deeply read. Like the old

Covenanters, of whom he was the worthy representative, his mouth
was full of sacred quotations; it was the book that he had studied

most and thought upon most deeply. To many people in his station
the Bible, and perhaps Burns, are the only books of any vital

literary merit that they read, feeding themselves, for the rest, on
the draff of country newspapers, and the very instructive but not

very palatable pabulum of some cheap educationalseries. This was
Robert's position. All day long he had dreamed of the Hebrew

stories, and his head had been full of Hebrew poetry and Gospel
ethics; until they had struck deep root into his heart, and the

very expressions had become a part of him; so that he rarely spoke
without some antique idiom or Scripture mannerism that gave a

raciness to the merest trivialities of talk. But the influence of