But what signified a barren patch or two? The
garden was so large. There was always a superfluity of broad beans--it
took nine or ten of Adam's strides to get to the end of the uncut grass
walk that ran by the side of them; and as for other vegetables, there
was so much more room than was necessary for them that in the rotation
of crops a large flourishing bed of groundsel was of yearly occurrence
on one spot or other. The very rose-trees at which Adam stopped to pluck
one looked as if they grew wild; they were all huddled together in bushy
masses, now flaunting with wide-open petals, almost all of them of the
streaked pink-and-white kind, which doubtless dated from the union
of the houses of York and Lancaster. Adam was wise enough to choose a
compact Provence rose that peeped out half-smothered by its flaunting
scentless neighbours, and held it in his hand--he thought he should be
more at ease holding something in his hand--as he walked on to the far
end of the garden, where he remembered there was the largest row of
currant-trees, not far off from the great yew-tree arbour.
But he had not gone many steps beyond the roses, when he heard the
shaking of a bough, and a boy's voice saying, "Now, then, Totty, hold
out your pinny--there's a duck.
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