For the
tiniest and most reluctant rootlet seemed to respond to his caressing
paternal touch; it was a pretty sight to see his huge fingers tying up
some slender stalk to its stick with the smallest thread, and he had
a reverent way of laying a bulb or seed in the ground, and then gently
shaping and smoothing a small mound over it, which made the little
inscription on the stick above more like an affecting epitaph than
ever. Much of this gentleness may have been that apology for his great
strength, common with large men; but his face was distinctly amiable,
and his very light blue eyes were at times wistful and doglike in their
kindliness. I was soon to learn, however, that placability was not
entirely his nature.
The garden was part of a fifty vara lot of land, on which I was
simultaneously erecting a house. But the garden was finished before the
house was, through certain circumstances very characteristic of that
epoch and civilization. I had purchased the Spanish title, the only
LEGAL one, to the land, which, however, had been in POSSESSION of a
"squatter." But he had been unable to hold that possession against a
"jumper,"--another kind of squatter who had entered upon it covertly,
fenced it in, and marked it out in building sites.
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