His whole
energies were devoted to the raising of much more practical things,
like lettuces, radishes, carrots, spring onions, and any other
vegetable which has the commendable reputation of arriving reasonably
early at maturity.
Twice that spring Mary's labors had been wasted because the section had
moved before the time was ripe from a gardener's point of view, and
although Mary strove to transplant his garden by uprooting the
vegetables, packing them away in a box in the motor, and planting them
out in the new position, the vegetables failed to survive the breaking
of their home ties, and languished and died in spite of Mary's tender
care. After the first failure he tried to lay out a portable garden,
enlisting the aid of "Chips" the carpenter in the manufacture of a
number of boxes, in which he placed earth and his new seedlings. This
attempt, however, failed even more disastrously than the first, the
O.C. having made a most unpleasant fuss on the discovery of two large
boxes of mustard and cress "cluttering up," as he called it, the
gun-mountings on one of the armored cars, and, when the section moved
suddenly in the dead of night, refusing point-blank to allow any
available space to be loaded up with Mary's budding garden. Mary's
plaintive inquiry as to what he was to do with the boxes was met by the
brutal order to "chuck the lot overboard," and the counter-inquiry as
to whether he thought this show was a perambulating botanical gardens.
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