bulbs and seeds and loads of advice and then Elizabeth, I guess, sort of
loved it into a home."

"Well--I guess," mused Skinflint Holden. "Must have cost you a pretty
penny?"

"Why, no, it didn't. I'm telling you it wasn't a matter of dollars so
much as love. If you use plenty of that you can economize on the money
somewhat. Of course, it means work but love always means service, you
know."

Old Skinflint Holden couldn't understand that sort of talk. It was said
that love was one of the things he knew nothing about. His great star
was money. He had had a chance to buy the old tavern but had seen no
possibilities in it of any kind. So he had passed it up and now a man
whose star was love and home had made a paradise of the hopeless ruin.

"And I'll be danged if he didn't have a whole small field of them there
blue lilies that the children calls flags, over to one corner looking so
darn pretty, like a chunk of sky had dropped there. I'd a never believed
it if I hadn't saw it. I guess Doc Philipps didn't give him them."

Rollins is a great crony of Doc Philipps who almost any day of the year
may be caught burrowing in the ground. For Doc Philipps is a tree maniac
and father to every little green growing thing. He knows trees as a
mother knows her children and he never sets foot outside his front gate
without having tucked somewhere into the many pockets about his big
person a stout trowel, some choice apple seeds, peach and cherry stones
or seedlings of trees and shrubs. In every ramble, and he is a great
walker, he searches for a spot where a tree seedling might grow to