LATER, THERE WAS only one fault to find with this choice of a summer lodging-place, and that was its complete lack of seclusion¹. At first the tiny house of Mrs. Almira Todd, which stood with its end to the street, appeared to be retired² and sheltered enough from the busy world, behind its bushy bit of a green garden, in which all the blooming things, two or three gay hollyhocks and some London-pride, were pushed back against the gray-shingled wall. It was a queer little garden and puzzling to a stranger, the few flowers being put at a disadvantage by so much greenery; but the discovery was soon made that Mrs. Todd was an ardent³ lover of herbs, both wild and tame, and the sea-breezes blew into the low end-window of the house laden⁴ with not only sweet-brier and sweet-mary, but balm and sage⁵ and borage and mint, wormwood and southernwood. If Mrs. Todd had occasion to step into the far corner of her herb plot, she trod heavily upon thyme, and made its fragrant⁶ presence known with all the rest. Being a very large person, her full skirts brushed and bent⁷ almost every slender stalk that her feet missed. You could always tell when she was stepping about there, even when you were half awake in the morning, and learned to know, in the course of a few weeks' experience, in exactly which corner of the garden she might be.