Not once did she hasten her preparations or
relinquish the cheerful serenity which endowed her large, loose figure
with a kind of majesty.

The next day I started in as general assistant and market boy to John
Chitling, and when I was not sorting over ripe vegetables or barrels of
apples fresh from the orchard, I was toiling up the long hill, with a
split basket, containing somebody's marketing, on my arm. By degrees I
learned the names of John Chitling's patrons, the separate ways to their
houses, which always seemed divided by absurd distances, and the faces
of the negro cooks who met me at the kitchen steps and relieved me of my
burden. In the beginning I was accompanied on my rounds by a fat,
smudge-nosed youth some six or eight years my senior, who smoked vile
tobacco and enlivened the way by villainous abuses of John Chitling and
the universe. For the first months, I fear, my outlook upon the
customers I served was largely coloured by his narratives, but when at
last he dropped off and went on a new job at the butcher's, I arrived
gradually at a more correct, and certainly a more charitable, point of
view. By the end of the winter I had ceased to believe that John
Chitling was a skinflint and his customers all vipers.

In the bright soft weather of that spring the city opened into a bloom
of faint pink and white, which comes back to me like a delicate
fragrance. The old gardens are gone now, with their honeysuckle arbours,
their cleanly swept walks, bordered by rows of miniature box, their
deep, odorous bowers of microphylla and musk cluster roses. Yet I can
look back still through the gauzy shadows of elms and sycamores; I can
hear still the rich, singing call of the negro drivers, as the covered
wagons from country farms passed sleepily through the hot sunshine which
fell between the arching trees; and I can smell again the air steeped in
a fragrance that is less that of flowers than of the subtle atmosphere
of an unforgettable youth. To-day the city is the same city no longer,
nor is the man who writes this the market boy who toiled up the long
hill in the blossoming spring, with the seeds of the future quickening
in brain and heart.

The morning that I remember best is the one on which I carried the day's
marketing to an old grey house, with beds of wallflowers growing close
against the stuccoed bricks, and a shrub that flowered bright yellow
glancing through the tall gate at the rear. I had passed the wallf