long time bedded in ice will come to life again: I can not tell about
that, but it is well enough known that if you dig deep in any old
garden, such as this, ancient, perhaps forgotten flowers, will appear.
The fashion has changed, they have been neglected or uprooted, but all
the time their life is hid below. And the older they are, the nearer
perhaps to their primary idea!"

By this time she was far more composed, though not yet had she made up
her mind what to say, or how to treat the dilemma in which she found
herself.

After a brief pause therefore, he resumed again:

"I don't fancy," he said, with a low, asthmatic laugh, "that we shall
have many forgotten weeds come up. They all, I suspect, keep pretty well
in the sun. But just think how the fierce digging of the crisis to which
the great Husbandman every now and then leads a nation, brings back to
the surface its old forgotten flowers. What virtues, for instance, the
Revolution brought to light as even yet in the nature of the corrupted
nobility of France!"

"What a peculiar goblin it is!" thought Juliet, beginning to forget
herself a little in watching and listening to the strange creature. She
had often seen him before, but had always turned from him with a kind of
sympathetic shame: of course the poor creature could not bear to be
looked at; he must know himself improper!

"I have sometimes wondered," Polwarth yet again resumed, "whether the
troubles without end that some people seem born to--I do not mean those
they bring upon themselves--may not be as subsoil plows, tearing deep
into the family mold, that the seeds of the lost virtues of their race
may in them be once more brought within reach of sun and air and dew. It
would be a pleasant, hopeful thought if one might hold it. Would it not,
ma'am?"

"It would indeed," answered Juliet with a sigh, which rose from an
undefined feeling that if some hidden virtue would come up in her, it
would be welcome. How many people would like to be good, if only they
might be good without taking trouble about it! They do not like goodness
well enough to hunger and thirst after it, or to sell all that they have
that they may buy it; they will not batter at the gate of the kingdom of
Heaven; but they look with pleasure on this or that aerial castle of
righteousness, and think it would be rather nice to live in it! They do
not know that it is goodness all the time their very being is pining
after, and that they are