[Illustration]

GARDENERS


"Venite agile, barchetta mia
Santa Lucia, Santa Lucia!"

accompanied by the enchanting fragrance of burning sage-brush, is wafted
up to my sleeping-porch, and I know that Signor Constantino Garibaldi is
early at work clearing the canyon side so that our Matilija poppies
shall not be crowded out by the wild. It is a pleasant awakening to a
pleasant world as the light morning mist melts away from a bay as
"bright and soft and bloomin' blue" as any Kipling ever saw. It seems
almost too good to be true, that in a perfect Italian setting we should
have stumbled on an Italian gardener, who whistles Verdi as he works.
True, he doesn't know the flowers by name, and in his hands a pair of
clippers are as fatal as the shears in the hands of Atropos, but he is
in the picture. When I see gardeners pruning I realize that that lady of
destiny shows wonderful restraint about our threads of fate--the
temptation to snip seems so irresistible.

Signor Garibaldi is a retired wine merchant driven out-of-doors by
illness, a most courteous and sensitive soul, with a talent for
letter-writing that is alone worth all the plumbago blossoms that he cut
away last year. The following letter was written to J---- while