und; now it was only
back and forth between them and him and Rachel Froke. There were
other people, too, but they would be longer finding them out.
"You'll know Miss Craydocke as soon as you see her; she is one of
those you always seem to have seen before."

Now Uncle Titus would not have said this to everybody; not even if
everybody had been his niece, and had come to live beside him.

Orchard Street is wide and sunny and pleasant; the river air comes
over it and makes it sweet; and Miss Craydocke's is a big, generous
house, of which she only uses a very little part herself, because
she lets the rest to nice people who want pleasant rooms and can't
afford to pay much rent; an old gentleman who has had a hard time in
the world, but has kept himself a gentleman through it all, and his
little cheery old lady-wife who puts her round glasses on and
stitches away at fine women's under-garments and flannel
embroideries, to keep things even, have the two very best rooms; and
a clergyman's widow, who copies for lawyers, and writes little
stories for children, has another; and two orphan sisters who keep
school have another; and Miss Craydocke calls her house the Beehive,
and buzzes up and down in it, and out and in, on little "seeing-to"
errands of care and kindness all day long, as never any queen-bee
did in any beehive before, but in a way that makes her more truly
queen than any sitting in the middle cell of state to be fed on
royal jelly. Behind the Beehive, is a garden, as there should be;
great patches of lily-of-the valley grow there that Miss Craydocke
ties up bunches from in the spring and gives away to little
children, and carries into all the sick rooms she knows of, and the
poor places. I always think of those lilies of the valley when I
think of Miss Craydocke. It seems somehow as if they were blooming
about her all the year through; and so they are, perhaps, invisibly.
The other flowers come in their season; the crocuses have been done
with first of all; the gay tulips and the snowballs have made the
children glad when they stopped at the gate and got them, going to
school. Miss Craydocke is always out in her garden at school-time.
By and by there are the tall white lilies, standing cool and serene
in the July heats; then Miss Craydocke is away at the mountains,
pressing ferns and drying grasses for winter parlors; but there is
somebody on duty at the garden dispensary always, and there are
flower-pensioners wh