CHAPTER XII.
A COLD DOUCHE ON A HOT FIT.
There lived at Plymouth, in a neat house at the back of the Hoe, and not far from the Citadel, a certain Mr.Basket, a retired haberdasher of Cheapside, upon whom the Major could count for a hospitable welcome.

The two had been friends--cronies almost--in their London days; dining together daily at the same cook-shop, and as regularly sharing after dinner a bottle of port to the health of King George and Mr.Pitt.

Nor, since their almost simultaneous retreat from the capital, had they allowed distance to diminish their mutual regard.
They frequently corresponded, and their letters included many a playful challenge to test one another's West Country hospitality.
Now while the Major had (to put it mildly) but exchanged one sphere of activity for another, Mr.Basket, a married man, embraced the repose of a contemplative life; cultivating a small garden and taking his wife twice a week to the theatre, of which he was a devotee.
These punctual jaunts, very sensibly practised as a purge against dullness, together with the stir and hubbub of a garrison town in which his walled garden stood isolated, as it were, all day long, amid marchings, countermarchings, bugle-calls, and the rumble of wagons filled with material of war, gave him a sense of being in the swim--of close participation in the world's affairs; failing which a great many folk seem to miss half the enjoyment of doing nothing in particular.
Mr.Basket welcomed the Major cordially, with a dozen rallying comments on his healthy rural complexion, and carried him off to admire the garden while Mrs.Basket enlarged her preparations for dinner at five o'clock.
The garden was indeed calculated to excite admiration, less for its flowers--for Mr.Basket confessed ruefully that very few flowers would grow with him--than for a hundred ingenuities by which this defect was concealed.
"And the beauty of it is," announced Mr.Basket, with a wave of his hand towards a black-and-white edging compound of marrow bones and the inverted bases of wine bottles, disposed alternately, "it harbours no slugs.

It saves labour, too; you would be surprised at the sum it used to cost me weekly in labour alone.

But," he went on, "I pin my faith to oyster shells.