and the children. From
the middle of the verandah a broad flight of steps, flanked on either
side by growing plants in pots, leads down to the road, and across the
road lie the tennis-lawns and the flower-garden. I have read that one
of the most pathetic things about this Land of Exile is the useless
effort to make English flowers grow. In Rika they must feel at home,
for the whole air is scented with roses and mignonette. When
Mrs. Royle took us to see her flowers, Boggley pulled a sprig of
mignonette, sniffed it appreciatively, and handing it to me said:

"What does that remind you of?"

"Miss Aitken's teas!" I said promptly. Always that scent takes me
straight back to sunny summer afternoons when

"The day was just a day to my mind,
All sunny before and sunny behind,
Over the heather,"

and myself in a stiffly starched frock, accompanied by three brothers
with polished faces and spotless collars setting out to drink tea with
our friends Miss Aitken and Miss Elspeth. There was always honey for
tea, I remember,--honey made by the bees that buzzed through laborious
days in their thatched houses in a corner of the sunny garden,--and
little round scones, and crisp shortbread; and, as we ate and
chattered, through the open windows the roses nodded in, giving
greeting to their friends, the roses of past summers dried and
entombed in great vases; and the scent of mignonette so mixed itself
with the sound of gentle old voices and childish trebles, the fragrant
tea in the fragile china cups, the prancing dragons in the cabinet,
that now, over the years, it brings them all back to me as surely, as
potently, as if it had been indeed a sprig of Oberon's wild thyme
or Ophelia's rosemary for remembrance. As I have told you, we were
naughty children, sometimes even wicked children, but our conduct at
this house was, "humanly speaking, perfect." The old ladies listened
so sympathetically to our tales of how many trout we had that day
_guddled_ in the burn; of the colt we had managed to catch and
mount--as a family--by the aid of the dyke, and of the few delirious
moments spent on its slippery back before it threw us--as a family; of
the ins and outs of why Boggley's nose was swelling visibly and his
right eye disappearing. They would look at each other, nodding wisely
at intervals while they murmured, "Interestin' bit bairnies." Boggley,
when young, was of a peculiarly fiery temper. At times one could
hardly look at him w