them!" said Lu, "they're so sweet!"

"Yes," he murmured lower, "they're like you. I always said so, you
remember."

"Oh, yes! and every May-day but the last you have brought them to me."

"Have you the trailing-arbutus there?" asked Mr. Dudley.

"No," returned Rose.

"I thought I detected strawberries," submitted the other,--"a pleasant
odor which recalls childhood to memory."

For some noses all sweet scents are lumped in one big strawberry;
clovers, or hyacinths, or every laden air indifferently, they still
sniff strawberries. Commonplace things!

"It's a sign of high birth to track strawberry-beds where no fruit is,
Mr. Dudley," said I.

"Very true, Miss Willoughby. I was born pretty high up in the Green
Mountains."

"And so keep your memory green?"

"Strawberries in June," said Rose, good-naturedly. "But fruit out of
season is trouble out of reason, the Dream-Book says. It's May now, and
these are its blossoms."

"Everybody makes such a fuss about ground-laurel!" said I. "I don't see
why, I'm sure. They're never perfect. The leaf is hideous,--a stupid
duenna! You get great green leaves, and the flowers all white; you get
deep, rosy flowers, and the leaves are all brown and bitten. They're
neither one thing nor another. They're just like heliotropes,--no bloom
at all, only scent. I've torn up myriads, to the ten stamens in their
feathered case, to find where that smell comes from,--that is perfectly
delicious,--and I never could. They are a cheat."

"Have you finished your tirade?" asked Rose, indifferently.

"I don't believe you mean so," murmured Lu. "They have a color of their
own, almost human, infantine; and when you mass them, the tone is more
soft and mellow than a flute. Everybody loves May-flowers."

"Just about. I despise flutes. I like bassoons."

"They are prophets of apple-blossoms."

"Which brings them at once into the culinary."

"They are not very showy," said Mr. Dudley; "but when we remember the
Fathers"----

"There's nothing like them," said Rose, gently, as he knelt by Lu,
slowly putting them into order; "nothing but pure, clear things; they're
the fruit of snowflakes, the firstlings of the year. When one thinks how
sweetly they come from their warm coverts and look into this cold,
breezy sky so unshrinkingly, and from what a soil they gather such a
wealth of simple beauty, one feels ashamed."

"Climax worthy of the useless things!" said I.

"The moment in which first we