ing
with the cries of innumerable water fowl that had risen an hour before
to enjoy the first breathings of the young day. To March Marston's ear
it seemed as though all Nature, animate and inanimate, were rejoicing in
the beneficence of its Creator.

The youth's reverie was suddenly broken by the approach of Theodore
Bertram.

"Good morrow, friend," said the latter, grasping March's hand and
shaking it heartily. "You are early astir. Oh, what a scene! What
heavenly colours! What a glorious expanse of beauty!"

The artist's hand moved involuntarily to the pouch in which he was won't
to carry his sketch-book, but he did not draw it forth; his soul was too
deeply absorbed in admiration to permit of his doing aught but gaze in
silence.

"This repays my toils," he resumed, soliloquising rather than speaking
to March. "'Twere worth a journey such as I have taken, twice repeated,
to witness such a scene as this."

"Ay, ain't it grand?" said March, delighted to find such congenial
enthusiasm in the young painter.

Bertram turned his eyes on his companion, and, in doing so, observed the
wild rose at his side.

"Ah! sweet rose," he said, stooping eagerly down to smell it.

"Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air."

"He was no poet who wrote that, anyhow," observed March with a look of
disdain.

"You are wrong, friend. He was a good poet and true."

"Do you mean to tell me that the sweetness o' that rose is _wasted_
here?"

"Nay, I do not say that. The poet did not mean to imply that its
sweetness is utterly wasted, but to assert the fact that, as far as
civilised man is concerned, it is so."

"`Civilised man,'" echoed March, turning up his nose (a difficult feat,
by the way, for his nose by nature turned down). "An' pray what's
`civilised man' that he should think everything's wasted that don't go
in at his own eyes, or up his own nose, or down his own throat? eh?"

Bertram laughed slightly (he never laughed heartily). "You are a severe
critic, friend."

"I don't know, and I don't care, what sort o' cricket I am; but this I
do know, that roses are as little wasted here as in your country--mayhap
not so much. Why, I tell ye I've seen the _bars_ smell 'em."

"Indeed."

"Ay, an' eat 'em too!"

"That was not taking a poetical view of them," suggested Bertram.

"Perhaps not, but it was uncommonly practical," returned March,
laughing.

The conve