Nevertheless, they
took some practical steps. To begin with, the soil of the garden
before the Blue Pavilion was entirely changed--Captain Barker
importing from The Hague no less than thirty tons of the mould most
approved by the Dutch tulip-growers. A tank, too, was sunk at the
back of the building towards the marsh, as a receptacle and reservoir
for rain-water; and by Tristram's fourth birthday his adoptive father
began to build, on the south side of the house, a hibernatory, or
greenhouse, differing in size only from that which Solomon de Caus
had the honour to erect for the Elector Palatine in his gardens at
Heidelberg.
Meanwhile Captain Runacles, who watched these operations from
the other side of the privet hedge and picked up many scraps of
rumour from the antique Simeon, was consumed with scorn and envy.
The two friends no longer spoke. At the back of the Fish and Anchor,
across the road, there stretched at this time the largest and fairest
bowling-green in the east of England--two good acres of smooth turf,
stretching almost to the edge of the sea-cliff, on which side the
wall was cut down to within a foot of the ground, so that the gossips
as they played, or sat and smoked on the benches about the green,
might have a clear view of the ships entering or leaving the harbour,
or of others that, hull-down on the horizon, took the sunset on their
sails.
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