in front of the fireplace,
where a jar of bayberry filled the place of logs between the andirons.
First, casting her eyes through the doors of dining room, living room,
and den, she fixed them on me with rather a mischievous twinkle, as she
said, "You shall gather and arrange the flowers for the house; and
always have plenty of them, but never a withered or dropsical blossom
among them all. You shall also invent new ways for arranging them, new
combinations, new effects, the only restriction being that you shall not
put vases where the water will drip on books, or make the house look
like the show window of a wholesale florist. I will give you a fresh
mop, and you can have the back porch and table for your workshop, and if
I'm not mistaken, you will find two hours a day little enough for the
work!" she added with very much the air of some one engaging a new
housemaid and presenting her with a broom!

It has never taken me two hours to gather and arrange the flowers, and
though of course we are only beginning to have much of a garden, we've
always had flowers in the house,--quantities of sweet peas and such
things, besides wild flowers. I began to protest, an injured feeling
rising in my throat, that she, Maria Maxwell, music teacher, city bound
for ten years, should think to instruct _me_ of recent outdoor
experience.

"Yes, you've always had flowers, but did you pick the sweet peas or did
Barney? Did you cram them haphazard into the first thing that came handy
(probably that awful bowl decorated in ten discordant colours and
evidently a wedding present, for such atrocities never find any other
medium of circulation)? Or did you separate them nicely, and arrange the
pink and salmon peas with the lavender in that plain-coloured Sevres
vase that is unusually accommodating in the matter of water, then
putting the gay colours in the blue-and-white Delft bowl and the duller
ones in cut glass to give them life? Having plenty, did you change them
every other day, or the moment the water began to look milky, or did you
leave them until the flowers clung together in the first stages of
mould? Meanwhile, the ungathered flowers on the vines were seriously
developing peas and shortening their stems to be better able to bear
their weight. And, Mary Penrose,"--here Maria positively glared at me as
if I had been a primary pupil in the most undesirable school of her
route who was both stone deaf and afflicted with catarrh, "did you wa