to do and almost every day Dickon came in, if only for a few minutes,
to talk about what was happening on the moor and in the lanes and
hedges and on the borders of streams. The things he had to tell about
otters and badgers and water-rats houses, not to mention birds
nests and field-mice and their burrows, were enough to make you almost
tremble with excitement when you heard all the intimate details from an
animal charmer and realized with what thrilling eagerness and anxiety
the whole busy underworld was working.
They re same as us, said Dickon, only they have to build their homes
every year. An it keeps em so busy they fair scuffle to get em
done.
The most absorbing thing, however, was the preparations to be made
before Colin could be transported with sufficient secrecy to the
garden. No one must see the chair-carriage and Dickon and Mary after
they turned a certain corner of the shrubbery and entered upon the walk
outside the ivied walls. As each day passed, Colin had become more and
more fixed in his feeling that the mystery surrounding the garden was
one of its greatest charms. Nothing must spoil that. No one must ever
suspect that they had a secret. People must think that he was simply
going out with Mary and Dickon because he liked them and did not object
to their looking at him. They had long and quite delightful talks about
their route. They would go up this path and down that one and cross the
other and go round among the fountain flower-beds as if they were
looking at the bedding-out plants the head gardener, Mr. Roach, had
been having arranged. That would seem such a rational thing to do that
no one would think it at all mysterious. They would turn into the
shrubbery walks and lose themselves until they came to the long walls.
It was almost as serious and elaborately thought out as the plans of
march made by great generals in time of war.
Rumors of the new and curious things which were occurring in the
invalid s apartments had of course filtered through the servants hall
into the stable yards and out among the gardeners, but notwithstanding
this, Mr. Roach was startled one day when he received orders from
Master Colin s room to the effect that he must report himself in the
apartment no outsider had ever seen, as the invalid himself desired to
speak to him.
164