Ch. 5 - An Old Scotch Gardener

I THINK I might almost have said the last: somewhere, indeed, in
the uttermost glens of the Lammermuir or among the southwestern
hills there may yet linger a decrepid representative of this bygone
good fellowship; but as far as actual experience goes, I have only
met one man in my life who might fitly be quoted in the same breath
with Andrew Fairservice, - though without his vices. He was a man
whose very presence could impart a savour of quaint antiquity to
the baldest and most modern flower-plots. There was a dignity
about his tall stooping form, and an earnestness in his wrinkled
face that recalled Don Quixote; but a Don Quixote who had come
through the training of the Covenant, and been nourished in his
youth on WALKER'S LIVES and THE HIND LET LOOSE.

Now, as I could not bear to let such a man pass away with no sketch
preserved of his old-fashioned virtues, I hope the reader will take
this as an excuse for the present paper, and judge as kindly as he
can the infirmities of my description. To me, who find it so
difficult to tell the little that I know, he stands essentially as
a GENIUS LOCI. It is impossible to separate his spare form and old
straw hat from the garden in the lap of the hill, with its rocks
overgrown with clematis, its shadowy walks, and the splendid
breadth of champaign that one saw from the north-west corner. The
garden and gardener seem part and parcel of each other. When I
take him from his right surroundings and try to make him appear for
me on paper, he looks unreal and phantasmal: the best that I can
say may convey some notion to those that never saw him, but to me
it will be ever impotent.

The first time that I saw him, I fancy Robert was pretty old
already: he had certainly begun to use his years as a stalking
horse. Latterly he was beyond all the impudencies of logic,
considering a reference to the parish register worth all the
reasons in the world, "I AM OLD AND WELL STRICKEN IN YEARS," he was
wont to say; and I never found any one bold enough to answer the
argument. Apart from this vantage that he kept over all who were
not yet octogenarian, he had some other drawbacks as a gardener.
He shrank the very place he cultivated. The dignity and reduced
gentility of his appearance made the small garden cut a sorry
figure. He was full of tales of greater situations in his younger
days. He spoke of castles and parks with a humbling familiarity.
He told of places where under-gardeners had trembled at his looks,
where there were meres and swanneries, labyrinths of walk and
wildernesses of sad shrubbery in his control, till you could not
help feeling that it was condescension on his part to dress your
humbler garden plots. You were thrown at once into an