Windfalls — A Reader’s Guide

The Author's Conversational Voice

Gardiner's essays read like extended asides delivered to a friend. He frequently uses parentheses and dashes to insert afterthoughts, as when he notes that Jemima was 'the victim of an accident at the christening ceremony.' The tone is intimate and self-deprecating; he admits to being 'a timid person' when recounting the story of a reporter wrongly accused of theft. This direct address—'You will have observed that I have twice referred to Jemima in the masculine gender'—creates a sense of shared amusement. The essays are structured around small incidents: digging artichokes, observing a swarm, or recalling a dinner. Gardiner's voice is the unifying thread, turning the mundane into material for reflection.

Truth and Its Many Sides

Several essays grapple with the elusiveness of truth. Gardiner uses the handkerchief incident in Othello to illustrate how isolated facts can mislead: 'Desdemona could not produce the handkerchief. That was the fact that the Moor saw.' He then recounts a real-life case from Fleet Street where a reporter's pawn tickets were mistaken for evidence of theft. The essay 'On Facts and the Truth' argues that 'a fact that is only half the truth (or a quarter) is the most dangerous lie.' Gardiner quotes Ruskin's remark that he is 'never satisfied that I have handled a subject properly till I have contradicted myself three times.' This theme recurs across the collection, urging readers to distrust easy conclusions.

Observations on Nature and Domestic Life

Gardiner's essays often begin with a simple outdoor activity—digging artichokes, watching bees, or sitting under a sycamore. In 'Jemima,' the duck's family of Indian runners follows him 'in single file' with 'a gabble of merry noises.' The author's attention to animal behavior is precise: Jemima is 'first into the breach' when the fork appears. Elsewhere, he defends wasps against common prejudice and reflects on the habits of bees. These pieces are not scientific but personal; they record what catches the eye during a quiet afternoon. The setting is an English orchard, and the essays capture the rhythms of a rural life that is unhurried and attentive to small details.

The Structure of the Collection

The book's table of contents lists over forty essays, each with a title that signals a topic: 'On Being Idle,' 'On Habits,' 'On Great Replies,' 'On a Hansom Cab.' The range is deliberately miscellaneous, as the preface acknowledges: the essays are 'windfalls' gathered from a 'modest orchard.' Gardiner writes under the pseudonym 'Alpha of the Plough,' and the pieces originally appeared in periodicals. The collection is not arranged by theme but by the associative logic of a leisurely mind. Readers familiar with the essay tradition will recognize the influence of Montaigne and Lamb, but Gardiner's voice is distinctly his own—wry, humane, and skeptical of certainty.

Gardiner's essays reward the reader who savors digression. The collection is best approached not as a sustained argument but as a series of conversations, each starting from a concrete image—a duck, a knife, a swarm of bees—and spiraling outward into reflection. The author's willingness to contradict himself and to question the sufficiency of facts makes these pieces feel alive to the complexity of experience. Read them in any order; the pleasure lies in the voice.

I found myself returning to Windfalls the other evening, particularly that gentle piece on idleness, and it stirred a quieter memory. There is a certain unhurried thread there, a way of sitting with one’s own thoughts, that I felt again elsewhere. It made me think of The Thread of Gold — A Closer Reading, which holds a similar, patient warmth, like sun on a dusty windowsill.