resetting my cosmos. I fled out to the wilderness in greater speed than
I had left it, and fairly threw myself prostrate at the feet of my
neglected garden. Peter helped me, a sun-blistered, brier-scratched,
ragged Peter, whose face had lost none of its beautiful, lofty, aloof
expression, but which was rendered almost ordinary by a long scratch
across the top of its nose. The scratch was inflicted, he told me, when
he held one of the thoroughbred Plymouth Rock biddies to be greased by
Sam for lice under her wings.

"Yes, but what about the play, Peter dear?" I asked, after we had weeded
and dug and watered and pulled up for an hour or two and had then seated
ourselves at the end of one of the long rows to rest.

"The play--oh, Betty, it is--" And his old look of rapture shot across
his face. Then Sam yelled to him, and me, too.

"Come on and help tie up onions," he called. "You Byrd!"

We went and we tied up--a whole white smelly mountain of them; but I
didn't care, for Sam showed me his day-book, and in just one week his
balance had shot up like the beautiful pink pie-plant in my garden. A
great big entry was from my beets that he had thinned and sold without
waiting for me.

"I'll give you a check when they are all sold, Betty," he said, in a
business-like way, and something in me made me glory in him and my
beets. "And isn't old Pete hitting the agricultural pace in fine style?"
he asked, as we walked out into my garden between the rows of my blush
peonies which had been grateful for the bone meal, and had bloomed,
though everybody who had given me the clumps had warned me that they