the stream, and a good way back from the Hauen, beside the road that
winds inland up the coombe. Twenty yards of garden divided his cottage
door from the road, and prevented the inmates from breaking their necks
as they stepped over its threshold. Even as it was, Old Zeb had
acquired a habit of singing out "Ware heads!" to the wayfarers whenever
he chanced to drop a rotund object on his estate; and if any small
article were missing indoors, would descend at once to the highway with
the cheerful assurance, based on repeated success, of finding it
somewhere below.

Over and above its recurrent crop of potatoes and flatpoll cabbages,
this precipitous garden depended for permanent interest on a collection
of marine curiosities, all eloquent of disaster to shipping. To begin
with, a colossal and highly varnished Cherokee, once the figure-head of
a West Indiaman, stood sentry by the gate and hung forward over the
road, to the discomfiture of unwarned and absent-minded bagmen. The
path to the door was guarded by a low fence of split-bamboo baskets that
had once contained sugar from Batavia; a coffee bag from the wreck of a
Dutch barque served for door-mat; a rum-cask with a history caught
rain-water from the eaves; and a lapdog's pagoda--a dainty affair,
striped in scarlet and yellow, the jetsom of some passenger ship--had
been deftly adapted by Old Zeb, and stood in line with three straw
bee-skips under the eastern wall.

The next day but one after Christmas dawned deliciously in Porthlooe,
bright with virginal sunshine, and made tender by the breath of the Gulf
Stream. Uncle Issy, passing up the road at nine o'clock, halted by the
Cherokee to pass a word with its proprietor, who presented the very
antipodes of a bird's-eye view, as he knocked about the crumbling clods
with his visgy at the top of the slope.