ve made that
preposterous bonnet for Adela to be the Weeding Woman in--much she'll
weed!--"

"I _shall_ weed," said Adela.

"Oh, yes! You'll weed,--Groundsel!--and leave Mary to get up the docks
and dandelions, and clear away the heap. But, never mind. Here we've
taken Mary's game, and she hasn't even got a part."

"Yes," said I, "I have; I have got a capital part. I have only to
think of a name."

"How shall you be dressed?" asked Adela.

"I don't know yet," said I. "I have only just thought of the part."

"Are you sure it's a good-enough one?" asked Harry, with a grave and
remorseful air; "because, if not, you must take Francis le Vean. Girls
are called Frances sometimes."

I explained, and I read aloud the bit that had struck my fancy.

Arthur got restless half-way through, and took out the Book of
Paradise. His letter was on his mind. But Adela was truly delighted.

"Oh, Mary," she said. "It is lovely. And it just suits you. It suits
you much better than being a Queen."

"Much better," said I.

"You'll be exactly the reverse of me," said Harry. "When I'm digging
up, you'll be putting in."

"Mary," said Arthur, from the corner where he was sitting with the
Book of Paradise in his lap, "what have you put a mark in the place
about honeysuckle for?"

"Oh, only because I was just reading there when James brought the
letters."

"John Parkinson can't have been quite so nice a man as Alphonse Karr,"
said Adela; "not so unselfish. He took care of the Queen's Gardens,
but he didn't think of making the lanes and hedges nice for poor
wayfarers."

I was in the rocking-chair, and I rocked harder to shake up something
that was coming into my head. Then I remembered.

"Yes, Adela, he did--a little. He wouldn't root up the honeysuckle out
of the hedges (and I suppose he wouldn't let his root-gatherers grub
it up, either); he didn't put it in the Queen's Gardens, but left it
wild outside--"

"To serve their senses that travel by it, or have no garden,"
interrupted Arthur, reading from the book, "and, oh, Mary! that
reminds me--_travel--travellers._ I've got a name for your part just
coming into my head. But it dodges out again like a wire-worm through
a three-pronged fork. _Travel--traveller--travellers_--what's the
common name for the--oh, dear! the what's his name that scrambles
about in the hedges. A flower--you know?"

"Deadly Nightshade?" said Harry.

"Deadly fiddlestick!--"

"Bryony?" I suggested.