ow there are prettier words
than pudding, but I can't help it,--the pudding went upon the record, I
feel sure, with the mite which was cast into the treasury by that other
poor widow whose deed the world shall remember forever, and with the
coats and garments which the good women cried over, when Tabitha, called
by interpretation Dorcas, lay dead in the upper chamber, with her
charitable needlework strewed around her.

--Such was the Book of the Maiden Sisters. You will believe me more
readily now when I tell you that I found the soul of Iris in the one that
lay open before me. Sometimes it was a poem that held it, sometimes a
drawing, angel, arabesque, caricature, or a mere hieroglyphic symbol of
which I could make nothing. A rag of cloud on one page, as I remember,
with a streak of red zigzagging out of it across the paper as naturally
as a crack runs through a China bowl. On the next page a dead
bird,--some little favorite, I suppose; for it was worked out with a
special love, and I saw on the leaf that sign with which once or twice in
my life I have had a letter sealed,--a round spot where the paper is
slightly corrugated, and, if there is writing there, the letters are
somewhat faint and blurred. Most of the pages were surrounded with
emblematic traceries. It was strange to me at first to see how often she
introduced those homelier wild-flowers which we call weeds,--for it
seemed there was none of them too humble for her to love, and none too
little cared for by Nature to be without its beauty for her artist eye
and pencil. By the side of the garden-flowers,--of Spring's curled
darlings, the hyacinths, of rosebuds, dear to sketching maidens, of
flower-de-luces and morning-glories, nay, oftener than these, and more
tenderly caressed by the colored brush that rendered them,--were those
common growths which fling themselves to be crushed under our feet and
our wheels, making themselves so cheap in this perpetual martyrdom that
we forget each of them is a ray of the Divine beauty.

Yellow japanned buttercups and star-disked dandelions,--just as we see
them lying in the grass, like sparks that have leaped from the kindling
sun of summer; the profuse daisy-like flower which whitens the fields, to
the great disgust of liberal shepherds, yet seems fair to loving eyes,
with its button-like mound of gold set round with milk-white rays; the
tall-stemmed succory, setting its pale blue flowers aflame, one after
another,