harebell,
heartsease, and heliotrope.

The euthanasia of the fading blossoms filled her shallow skep
half-a-dozen times over, and, to anyone ignorant (to his shame) of the
art which our first ancestor surely learned from his mother, and loved,
it might have seemed that Mrs. Chigwin used her scissors with a too
unsparing hand. But the happy old soul knew what she was about. The
evening was closing in, and she had cut both the flowers whose beauty
had passed away and those which would have been wrinkled and flabby
before the morning, knowing full well that only so can you reckon on the
perfection of beauty from day to day.

"There, now," she said, when her last basketful was disposed of, "I have
done. And if old Squire Jermyn, who first laid out this garden, was to
come to life again to-morrow, there would be nothing in Martha Chigwin's
little plot to make his hair stand on end."

She threw her eyes comprehensively round the ring of cottages which
encircled the village green, with a sniff of defiant challenge, as
though she would dare any of her neighbors to make the same boast; and
then she came and sat down on the garden-seat, and said to her old
friend and companion,

"What do you think about it, Elizabeth?"

"You are right, Martha; right as you always are," said Mrs. Bundlecombe,
in a feeble voice. "And I was thinking as you went round, cutting off
the flowers that have had their day, that if you had come to me and cut
me off with the rest of them, there would have been one less poor old
withered thing in the world. Here have I been a wretched cripple on your
hands all the summer, and surely if the Lord had had any need for me He
would not have broken my stalk and left me to shrivel up in the
sunshine."

"Now, Bessy," said Mrs. Chigwin, severely, "do you want to put out the
light of peace that we have been enjoying for days past? Fie, for shame!
and in a garden, too. Where's your gratitude--or, leastways, where's
your patience?"

"There, there, Martha, you know I did not mean it. But I sit here
thinking and thinking, till I could write whole volumes on the vanity of
human wishes. Cut me off, indeed, just at this moment, when I am waiting
to see my dear boy once more before I die!"

Mrs. Bundlecombe was silent again, and the other did not disturb her,
knowing by experience what the effort to speak would be likely to end
in.

Things had not gone well at Birchmead in the last six months. The news
of Alan's a