As the Mantuan would
observe--"
'nec fertilis illa juvencis,
Nec Cereri opportuna seges, nec commoda Baccho.'
To attend to it my father employed, on Wednesdays and Saturdays, an
old fellow over whose head some sixty-five summers had passed without
imparting to it a single secret. In short, he was the very worst
gardener in West Bromicheham, and so obstinately, so insufferably,
opinionated withal that one day, in a fit of irritation, my father
slew him with his own spade.
"This done, he had at once to consider how to dispose of the body.
Our garden, as I have said, was confined within brick walls, two long
and one short; and this last my father had screened with a rustic
shed and a couple of laurel-bushes; that from his back-parlour
window, where he sat and smoked his pipe on a Sunday afternoon, he
might watch the path 'wandering,' as he put it, 'into the shrubbery,'
and feast his eyes on a domain which extended not only further than
the arm could stretch, but even a little further than the eye could
reach.
"In the space, then, intervening between the laurels and the terminal
wall my father dug a grave two spits deep and interred the corpse,
covering it with a light compost of loam and leaf-mould.
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