Mr. Dunthorne scratched his head. I sat down on Mrs. Jellyby’s stool, picked up her spoon, filled a sack, labeled it with a tag on which was written, in her extraordinary copper-plate script, “Cypress Vine from Romney,” and put it with the others.
“This old lady’s the only person I ever heard of that Rick had any real respect for,” Mr. Dunthorne said abruptly. He put a spoonful of larkspur seeds into a bag and labeled it. “Rick said they liked her best when their mother used to go down to Aiken or up to Bar Harbor, and she used to eat up at the house. They’d sit around and play rummy, or talk—”
He stopped suddenly. “Hey, what’s that?”
He got up and leaned across the table.
“What?” I said.
“In the bottom of your basket.”
He thrust his spoon down in the millions of tiny black seeds in
