And as years glided on, as the old school passed into other hands, and
the band of youthful companions became more and more dispersed, one of
the latter opinions began to gain ground among us, when two or three
chanced to meet, and to talk of old schoolfellows. If she had been alive
and in the great world, surely some of us should have heard of her. Her
having been a Catholic, rendered her taking the veil not improbable;
and to a person of her enthusiastic temper, the duties of the sisters of
Mercy would have peculiar charms.

As one of that most useful and most benevolent order, or as actually
dead, we were therefore content to consider her, until, in the lapse of
years and the changes of destiny, we had ceased to think of her at all.

The second of this present month of May was a busy and a noisy day in
my garden. All the world knows what a spring this has been. The famous
black spring commemorated by Gilbert White can hardly have been more
thoroughly ungenial, more fatal to man or beast, to leaf and flower,
than this most miserable season, this winter of long days, when the sun
shines as if in mockery, giving little more heat than his cold sister
the moon, and the bitter north-east produces at one and the same moment
the incongruous annoyances of biting cold and suffocating dust Never was
such a season. The swallows, nightingales, and cuckoos were a fortnight
after their usual time. I wonder what they thought of it, pretty
creatures, and how they made up their minds to come at all!--and the
sloe blossom, the black thorn winter as the common people call it,
which generally makes its appearance early in March along with the
first violets, did not whiten the hedges this year until full two months
later,* In short, everybody knows that this has been a most villanous
season, and deserves all the ill that can possibly be said of it. But
the second of May held forth a promise which, according to a very usual
trick of English weather, it has not kept; and was so mild and smiling
and gracious, that, without being quite so foolish as to indulge in any
romantic and visionary expectation of ever seeing summer again, we were
yet silly enough to be cheered by the thought that spring was coming at
last in good earnest.

* It is extraordinary how some flowers seem to obey the
season, whilst others are influenced by the weather. The
hawthorn, certainly nearly akin to the sloe blossom, is this
year rather forwa