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“How do you do, Master?” he said heartily. (The Bayside pedagogue was invariably addressed as “Master” by young and old.) “I’m glad to see you. Here I am, trying to save my rosebushes. There are green bugs on ’em, Master–green bugs, and they’re worrying the life out of me.”

I smiled, for Uncle Dick looked very unlike a worrying man, even over such a serious accident as green bugs.

“Your roses don’t seem to mind, Mr. Oliver,” I said. “They are the finest I have ever seen.”

The compliment to his roses, well-deserved as it was, did not at first engage his attention. He pretended to frown at me.

“Don’t get into any bad habit of mistering me, Master,” he said. “You’d better begin by calling me Uncle Dick from the start and then you won’t have the trouble of changing. Because it would come to that–it always does. But come in, come in! There’s a gate round here. I want to get acquainted with you. I have a taste for schoolmasters. I didn’t possess it when I was a boy” (a glint of fun appeared in his blue eyes). “It’s an acquired taste.”

I accepted his invitation and went, not only into his garden but, as was proved later, into his confidence and affection. He linked his arm with mine and piloted me about to show me his pets.

“I potter about this garden considerable,” he said. “It pleases the women folks to have lots of posies.”

I laughed, for Uncle Dick was a bachelor and considered to be a hopeless one.

“Don’t laugh, Master,” he said, pressing my arm. “I’ve no woman folk of my own about me now, ’tis true. But all the girls in the district come to Uncle Dick when they want flowers for their little diversions. Besides–perhaps–sometimes–“

Uncle Dick broke off and stood in a brown study, looking at an old stump aflame with nasturtiums for fully three minutes. Later on I was to learn the significance of that pause and reverie.

I spent the whole evening with Uncle Dick. After we had explored the garden he took me into his house and into his “den.” The house was a small white one and wonderfully neat inside, considering the fact that Uncle Dick was his own housekeeper. His “den” was a comfortable place, its one window so shadowed by a huge poplar that the room had a grotto-like effect of emerald gloom. I came to know it well, for, at Uncle Dick’s invitation, I did my studying there and browsed at will among his classics. We soon became close friends. Uncle Dick had always “chummed with the masters,” as he said, but our friendship went deeper. For my own part, I preferred his company to that of any young man I knew. There was a perennial spring of youth in Uncle Dick’s soul that yet had all the fascinating flavour of ripe experience. He was clever, kindly, humorous and, withal, so crystal clear of mind and heart that an atmosphere partaking of childhood hung around him.

I knew Uncle Dick’s outward history as the Bayside people knew it. It was not a very eventful one. He had lost his father in boyhood; before that there had been some idea of Dick’s going to college. After his father’s death he seemed quietly to have put all such hopes away and settled down to look after the farm and take care of his invalid stepmother. This woman, as I learned from others, but never from Uncle Dick, had been a peevish, fretful, exacting creature, and for nearly thirty years Uncle Dick had been a very slave to her whims and caprices.

“Nobody knows what he had to put up with, for he never complained,” Mrs. Lindsay, my landlady, told me. “She was out of her mind once and she was liable to go out of it again if she was crossed in anything. He was that good and patient with her. She was dreadful fond of him too, for all she did almost worry his life out. No doubt she was the reason he never married. He couldn’t leave her and he knew no woman would go in there. Uncle Dick never courted anyone, unless it was Rose Lawrence. She was a cousin of my man’s. I’ve heard he had a kindness for her; it was years ago, before I came to Bayside. But anyway, nothing came of it. Her father’s health failed and he had to go out to California. Rose had to go with him, her mother being dead, and that was the end of Uncle Dick’s love affair.”