The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Laurel Bush, by Dinah Maria Mulock Craik

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Title: The Laurel Bush

Author: Dinah Maria Mulock Craik

Release Date: January 17, 2005 [eBook #14708]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LAUREL BUSH***

E-text prepared by Robin Eugene Escovado

THE LAUREL BUSH

An Old-Fashioned Love Story

by

DINAH MARIA MULOCK CRAIK

Author of _John Halifax, Gentleman_,
&c., &c., &c.

Chapter 1.

It was a very ugly bush indeed; that is, so far as any thing in nature
can be really ugly. It was lopsided--having on the one hand a stunted
stump or two, while on the other a huge heavy branch swept down to the
gravel-walk. It had a crooked gnarled trunk or stem, hollow enough to
entice any weak-minded bird to build a nest there--only it was so near
to the ground, and also to the garden gate. Besides, the owners of
the garden, evidently of practical mind, had made use of it to place
between a fork in its branches a sort of letter-box--not the government
regulation one, for twenty years ago this had not been thought of; but a
rough receptacle, where, the house being a good way off, letters might be
deposited, instead of; as hitherto, in a hole in the trunk--near the foot
of the tree, and under shelter of its mass of evergreen leaves.

This letter-box; made by the boys of the family at the instigation and
with the assistance of their tutor, had proved so attractive to some
exceedingly incautious sparrow that during the intervals of the post she
had begun a nest there, which was found by the boys. Exceedingly wild
boys they were, and a great trouble to their old grandmother, with whom
they were staying the summer, and their young governess--"Misfortune,"
as they called her, her real name being Miss Williams--Fortune Williams.
The nickname was a little too near the truth, as a keener observer than
mischievous boys would have read in her quiet, sometimes sad, face; and
it had been stopped rather severely by the tutor of the elder boys, a
young man whom the grandmother had been forced to get, to "keep them in
order!" He was a Mr. Robert Roy, once