us, but say a child, a little boy or girl. There's no
association or relation there at all; the strawberries called up love,
which is better than a pleasant feast."

"According to Wordsworth, the flower in the crannied wall and the
strawberry teach the same lesson, for does he not say:--

That life is love and immortality.

* * * * *

Life, I repeat, is energy of love,
Divine or human, exercised in pain,
In strife and tribulation, and ordained,
If so approved and sanctified, to pass
Through shades and silent rest, to endless joy?

At any rate, that is what he puts into his Parson's lips.

"Farquhar, my boy, I think we'd better stop, for I'm weakening fast.
It's sentimental the flowers and the fruit are making me. I mind, when I
was a little fellow in the old sod, my mother gathering wild flowers
from the hedges and putting them all round the ribbon of my straw hat. I
can't pay her the debt of that mark of love the same way, but I feel I
should pay it to somebody. You never told me about your mother."

"No, because she is dead and gone long ago, and my father married again,
and brought a vixen, with two trollops of girls, to take the place of an
angel. These three women turned my stomach at all the sex. Look, there's
a pretty woman for you!"

They had reached a clearing in the bush, consisting of a corn patch and
a potato field, in which a woman, with a man's hat on her head and a
pair of top-boots upon her nether extremities, looking a veritable guy,
was sprinkling the potato plants with well-diluted Paris green. The
shanty pertaining to the clearing was some little distance from the
road, and, hoping to get a drink of water there, Coristine prepared to
jump the rail fence and make his way towards it. The woman, seeing what
he was about, called: 'Hi, Jack, Jack!' and immediately a big mongrel
bull-dog came tearing towards the travellers, barking as he ran.

"Come back, Corry, for heaven's sake, or he'll bite you!" cried
Wilkinson.

"Never a fear," answered the lately sentimental botanist; "barking dogs
don't bite as a rule." So he jumped the fence in earnest, and said
soothingly, as if he were an old friend: "Hullo, Jack, good dog!"
whereupon the perfidious Jack grovelled at his feet and then jumped up
for a caress. But the woman came striding along, picking up a grubbing
hoe by the way to take the place of the treacherous defender of the
house.

"H