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Chapter Seven
Mr Sorleyson was lifting his potatoes, too. He had had a few
drills planted and was working among thorn now, gathering sufficient
for dinner in a little shopping-basket. He had never been quite happy
about this potato-patch. In the lawn beside it grew clove-lilies,
mignonette, sweat-william and verbena, and these, in their turn,
carried on a scented pageantry from spring till Autumn. To his city
mind there was something peculiarly distasteful in this proximity of
flowers to vegetables. In the Spring the knifesharp symmetrica] drills
seemed uncouth beside the delicate blossoms, and even in the Summer
when the dark heavy leaves of the vegetable hid the soil, they remained,
blatantly, potato leaves.
He had often walked through his neighbours’ gardens. None was so
well kept nor so neat as the Manse garden, There he saw dog-roses
growing among beans and carnations stretching their indolent silver
stems over shive-beds. on the whole, he had to admit, there was a
pleasing harmony in these gardens. Adn without being quite able to
explain why, Mr Sorleyson felt a strong aversion to this mingling of
the orderly with the arbitary. Perhaps it was because it ran counter
to the attitude to which ho clung so strenously. Perhaps it was
because it resembled too closely the lives of many of his congregation.
He had discovered that these men and women who, from childhood, had
been taught to esteem righteousness, could, without any fueling of
