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“Maybe it will make me forget my foot if I can go and water them.”

So he arose, crawling on his hands and knees down-stairs very softly, past where Jiminy tossed in his bed, and softer still past the minister’s door. But there was no sound save the creak of the stair under him.

Jaikie crept to the water-pail, and got the large quart tankard that hung by the side of the wall.

It was a hard job for a little lad to get a heavy tin filled–a harder still to unlock the door and creep away across the square of gravel. “You have no idea” (so he said afterwards) “how badly gravel hurts your knees when they are bare.”

Luckily it was a hot night, and not a breath of air was stirring, so the little white-clad figure moved slowly across the front of the house to the green gate of the garden. Jaikie could only reach out as far as his arms would go with the tin of water. Then painfully he pulled himself forward towards the tankard. But in spite of all he made headway, and soon he was creeping up the middle walk, past the great central sundial, which seemed high as a church-steeple above him. The ghostly moths fluttered about him, attracted by the waving white of his garments. In their corner he found the flowers, and, as he had thought, they were withered and drooping.

He lifted the water upon them with his palms, taking care that none dripped through, for it was very precious, and he seemed to have carried it many miles.

And as soon as they felt the water upon them the flowers paid him back in perfume. The musk lifted up its head, and mingled with the late velvety wallflower and frilled carnation in releasing a wonder of expressed sweetness upon the night air.

“I wish I had some for you, dear dimpled buttercups,” said Jaikie to the golden chalices which grew in the hollows by the burnside, where in other years there was much moisture; “can you wait another day?”

“We have waited long,” they seemed to reply; “we can surely wait another day.”

Then the honeysuckle reached down a single tendril to touch Jaikie on the cheek.

“Some for me, please,” it said; “there are so many of us at our house, and so little to get. Our roots are such a long way off, and the big fellows farther down get most of the juice before it comes our way. If you cannot water us all, you might pour a little on our heads.” So Jaikie lifted up his tankard and poured the few drops that were in the bottom upon the nodding heads of the honeysuckle blooms.

“Bide a little while,” said he, “and you shall have plenty for root and flower, for branch and vine-stem.”

There were not many more loving little boys than Jaikie in all the world; and with all his work and his helping and talking, he had quite forgotten about the pain in his foot.

Now, if I were telling a story–making it up, that is–it is just the time for something to happen,–for a great trumpet to blow to tell the world what a brave fellow this friend of the flowers was; or at least for some great person, perhaps the minister himself, to come and find him there alone in the night. Then he might be carried home with great rejoicing.

But nothing of the kind happened. In fact, nothing happened at all. Jaikie began to creep back again in the quiet, colourless night; but before he had quite gone away the honeysuckle said–

“Remember to come back to-morrow and water us, and we will get ready such fine full cups of honey for you to suck.”

And Jaikie promised. He shut the gate to keep out the hens. He crept across the pebbles, and they hurt more than ever. He hung up the tin dipper again on its peg, and climbed the stairs to his bedroom. Jiminy was breathing as quietly and equally as a lazy red-spotted trout in the shadow of the bank in the afternoon. Jaikie crept into his bed and fell asleep without a prayer or a thought.

He did not awake till quite late in the day, when Jiminy came to tell him that somebody had been watering the flowers in their Corner of Shadows during the night.

” I think it must have been the angels,” said Jiminy, before Jaikie had time to tell him how it all happened. “My father he thinks so too.”

The latter statement was, of course, wholly unauthorised.

Jaikie sat up and put his foot to the floor. All the pain had gone away out of it. He told Jiminy, who had an explanation for everything. He knew how the foot had got better and how the flowers were watered.

“‘Course it must have been the angels, little baby angels that can’t fly yet–only crawl. I did hear them scuffling about the floor last night.”

And this, of course, explained everything.