Northern Weekly Gazette. — 1907-01-19 (Stockton-on-Tees, Cleveland, England)

GOODYEAR.  'Just look at the beastly things," I cried, ecornfully dragging up a pair of marigolds and pitching them on the garden path. "The marigolds next door are showing buds as big as the plates in your dolly's tea party, but you'd have to .quint for hours through a, microscope before you found the shadow of a bud on these spidery (objects. I'm going to chuck gardening; it's rot." I could see tears in Jill's eyes, but she's a jolly plucky little girl for eleven years old, and she wouldn't cry if you pulled her hair out by the handful. Those marigolds were her own property —the only two that came out of a whole penny packet of seeds, and it hurt her a bit to see me jerk them out by the roots, like a, dentist drawing teeth.  But there really was no use in keeping them any longer. They wouldn't have flowered if we'd gone wabering them till doomsday. "I tell you what it is Jill—we don't get enough warm th here for flowers," I said. "Those whopping big trees on the other side, and the asylum -wall on this, shirt out all the sunshine, and the plants feel as bad as you and I would do if we -were locked in Mother Jenkinson's (*liar all day. I vote we dig up the plants and set them at the other side of the wall. They'll get no end of sunshine there."  Jill drew in her breath. "Oh, but we daren't, Jack," she said. "The mad people would steal all our flowers and kill us when they- cang-ht us, and it :night be days and days before sister Dolly knew W were dead."  "Fiddlesticks !" I said. "Lunatics don't kill people nowadays. They go about pretending to be kings and queens and people of that kind, and it keeps them as happy as larks. There's one next door who tkinks he's a policeman, and is always ordering the bushes in the garden to move on. You can see all the fun from Dolly's window; that is when she'll let you peep, which isn't often, worse luck. Anyhow, I know a nice little patch of groftlud which neither the lunatics nor the keepers go near. It'll make a famous garden." "But it's such a horful high wall, Jack." (Jill's been told scores of times not to say " horful, ' but you couldn't knock grammar into her with a club.) I—l don't think I could climb it."  "Of course you couldn't, silly, if the wall were )ow enough to climb, they'd never dare to let the lunatics out for an airing. The beggars would shin over into our garden and make the place a Bedlam. We're not going over the wall; we're going through it." Through it I" gasped Jill. "Yes. D'ye see how loose these bricks are?" I picked out the mortar with a penknife, and a bit of a pull will bring them out as easy as winking. We can put them back easefully when we've finished our gardening, and nobody will ever twig what we're up to. Let's start, now, shall we?" "But they'll hear us, Jack." They will if you scream Murder ' every time you see a, caterpillar," I said. "We must speak as little as possible, and always in a whisper, and walk about without boots and stockings to deaden our footsteps." "That will make our stocking's orful messy vrhen we put them on again." Jill objected. Not it. We will dip our foci- in the wateringcan and dry them on your pinafore. Don't funk, Jill. Fetch the spade and the trowel while I take the brickeout, and we'll make a eth.st right away." Well, not to make too long a tale of it (as Uncle fahno* eitYs vrhen e talked nearly vverzone