and opened it
carelessly, it was sure to fall apart at his "Essay on Gardens."
"Listen," her ladyship would say, "to what that great philosopher and
statesman says. 'Next to that,'--he is speaking of violets, my dear,--'is
the musk-rose,'--of which you remember the great bush, at the corner of
the south wall just by the Blue Drawing-room windows; that is the old
musk-rose, Shakespeare's musk-rose, which is dying out through the
kingdom now. But to return to my Lord Bacon: 'Then the strawberry
leaves, dying with a most excellent cordial smell.' Now the Hanburys can
always smell this excellent cordial odour, and very delicious and
refreshing it is. You see, in Lord Bacon's time, there had not been so
many intermarriages between the court and the city as there have been
since the needy days of his Majesty Charles the Second; and altogether in
the time of Queen Elizabeth, the great, old families of England were a
distinct race, just as a cart-horse is one creature, and very useful in
its place, and Childers or Eclipse is another creature, though both are
of the same species. So the old families have gifts and powers of a
different and higher class to what the other orders have. My dear,
remember that you try if you can smell the scent of dying
strawberry-leaves in this next autumn. You have some of Ursula Hanbury's
blood in you, and that gives you a chance."

But when October came, I sniffed and sniffed, and all to no purpose; and
my lady--who had watched the little experiment rather anxiously--had to
give me up as a hybrid. I was mortified, I confess, and thought that it
was in some ostentation of her own powers that she ordered the gardener
to plant a border of strawberries on that side of the terrace that lay
under her windows.

I have wandered away from time and place. I tell you all the
remembrances I have of those years just as they come up, and I hope that,
in my old age, I am not getting too like a certain Mrs. Nickleby, whose
speeches were once read out aloud to me.

I came by degrees to be all day long in this room which I have been
describing; sometimes sitting in the easy-chair, doing some little piece
of dainty work for my lady, or sometimes arranging flowers, or sorting
letters according to their handwriting, so that she could arrange them
afterwards, and destroy or keep, as she planned, looking ever onward to
her death. Then, after the sofa was brought in, she would watch my face,
and if she saw